{"id":15892,"date":"2017-09-25T00:50:06","date_gmt":"2017-09-25T04:50:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.wyliecomm.com\/?page_id=15892"},"modified":"2023-12-27T11:44:39","modified_gmt":"2023-12-27T15:44:39","slug":"quotes-about-information-overload-in-communication","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.wyliecomm.com\/writing-tips\/what-is-readability\/importance-of-readability\/information-overload-in-communication\/quotes-about-information-overload-in-communication\/","title":{"rendered":"Quotes about information overload in communication"},"content":{"rendered":"

What writers & others say<\/h2>\n

\"Quotes

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\u201cMost managers receive much more data (if not information) than they can possibly absorb even if they spend all of their time trying to do so. Hence they already suffer from an information overload.\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u2014 Russell L. Ackoff, American organizational theorist<\/h6>\n
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\u201cYour readers receive the data equivalent of 174 newspapers a day \u2014 ads included.\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u2015 USC\u2019s Annenberg School for Communication<\/h6>\n
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“In your thirst for knowledge, be sure not to drown in all the information.”<\/h5>\n
\u2014 Anthony J. D’Angelo, author, The College Blue Book<\/em><\/h6>\n
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“Knowledge is not only power, but sometimes overpowering.”<\/h5>\n
\u2014 Anonymous<\/h6>\n
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“We’re always making the crazy assumption that readers are reading everything we write.”<\/h5>\n
\u2014 William Blundell, author of The Art and Craft of Feature Writing<\/em><\/h6>\n
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“The information in the world doubles every day. What they don’t tell us is that our wisdom is cut in half at the same time.”<\/h5>\n
\u2014 John Seely Brown, co-author of The Social Life of Information<\/em><\/h6>\n
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“data smog: To be overwhelmed with too much information. Example: A Google search that turns up six million references is data smog.”<\/h5>\n
\u2014 BuzzWhack<\/h6>\n
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“landspam: Spam delivered the old-fashioned way \u2014 on paper and via your local Postal Service worker. Some of us still call it ‘junk mail.'”<\/h5>\n
\u2014 BuzzWhack<\/h6>\n
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“mental Pez: To be hit with so much information that it becomes impossible to focus on one thing, so stuff goes from top-of-mind to tip-of-tongue, only to eventually fall out of our head completely \u2026 sort of like a mental Pez. (From the ‘Sally Forth’ comic strip.)”<\/h5>\n
\u2014 BuzzWhack<\/h6>\n
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“smotherage: A form of media overkill. When a news organization covers an event (generally of little significance) with multiple reporters, producing stories on every conceivable angle and providing perspectives almost no one is interested in.”<\/h5>\n
\u2014 BuzzWhack<\/h6>\n
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“Try reading a book while doing a crossword puzzle. That\u2019s the intellectual environment of the Internet.”<\/h5>\n
\u2014 Nicholas Carr, author of\u00a0The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains<\/em><\/h6>\n
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\u201cThe Net is, by design, an interruption system, a machine geared for dividing attention.\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u2014 Nicholas Carr, author of\u00a0The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains<\/em><\/h6>\n
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“Psychological research long ago proved what most of us know from experience: frequent interruptions scatter our thoughts, weaken our memory, and make us tense and anxious. The more complex the train of thought we\u2019re involved in, the greater the impairment the distractions cause.”<\/h5>\n
\u2014 Nicholas Carr, author of\u00a0The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains<\/em><\/h6>\n
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The web\u00a0\u201cturns us into lab rats constantly pressing levers to get tiny pellets of social or intellectual nourishment.”<\/h5>\n
\u2014 Nicholas Carr, author of\u00a0The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains<\/em><\/h6>\n
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“If information is power, it is also a pain.”<\/h5>\n
\u2014 Scott Canon, staff writer for The Kansas City Star<\/em><\/h6>\n
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\u201cAn environment with excess information devours the one thing that information truly demands: attention. Attention is becoming scarce, so we have to use it wisely when we get it.\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u2015 Alistair Croll, founder, Fwd50<\/h6>\n
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\u201cThe fewer data needed, the better the information. And an overload of information, that is, anything much beyond what is truly needed, leads to information blackout. It does not enrich, but impoverishes.\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u2014 Peter Drucker, Austrian-American management consultant, educator, and author<\/h6>\n
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\u201cOf making books there is no end.\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u2014 Ecclesiastes 12:12<\/h6>\n
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“Information is not knowledge.”<\/h5>\n
\u2014 Albert Einstein, Nobel Prize-winning physicist<\/h6>\n
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\u201cWe are bombarded on all sides by a vast number of messages we don’t want or need. More information is generated in a single day than we can absorb in a lifetime. To fully enjoy life, all of us must find our own breathing space and peace of mind.\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u2015 James E. Faust, American lawyer<\/h6>\n
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“Be a complexity reducer, not an information producer.”<\/h5>\n
\u2014 Diane Gayeski, Ph.D., CEO of Gayeski Analytics<\/h6>\n
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“We take it, as a given, that the more information decision makers have, the better off they are. But what does the Goldman algorithm say? Quite the opposite: that all that extra information isn’t actually an advantage at all. In fact, that extra information is more than useless. It’s harmful. It confuses the issues.”<\/h5>\n
\u2014 Malcolm Gladwell, author, in Blink<\/em><\/h6>\n
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“The strongest human instinct is to impart information. The second strongest is to resist it.”<\/h5>\n
\u2014 Kenneth Grahame, Scottish novelist<\/h6>\n
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“The sheer volume of information dissolves the information. We are unable to take it all in.”<\/h5>\n
\u2014 G\u00fcnther Grass, German author<\/h6>\n
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\u201cNo wonder \u2018wired\u2019 means both \u2018connected to the internet\u2019 and \u2018high, frantic, unable to concentrate.\u2019\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u2015 Johann Hari, UK journalist<\/h6>\n
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\u201cEmployees spend nearly half their workweeks reading emails and finding information. Add sharing that information in-house, and that leaves just 39% of their workweeks for doing their jobs.\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u2015 McKinsey Global Institute<\/h6>\n
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“The two words ‘information’ and ‘communication’ are often used interchangeably, but they signify quite different things. Information is giving out; communication is getting through.”<\/h5>\n
\u2014 Sydney J. Harris, an American journalist for the Chicago Sun-Times<\/em><\/h6>\n
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“More information doesn\u2019t always improve decision-making; in fact, it can undermine it.”<\/h5>\n
\u2014 Judith H. Hibbard and Ellen Peters, researchers<\/h6>\n
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“Attention is the currency of the information economy.”<\/h5>\n
\u2014 Shel Holtz, ABC, principal of Communications & Technology<\/h6>\n
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\u201cIn the age of technology there is constant access to vast amounts of information. The basket overflows; people get overwhelmed; the eye of the storm is not so much what goes on in the world, it is the confusion of how to think, feel, digest, and react to what goes on.\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u2014 Criss Jami, American poet and essayist<\/h6>\n
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\u201cWe live in the information age and the sheer volume of it being available everywhere, creates a need for information that has value. Yes, we can look anything up on Google but who has the time? Can we trust that the information comes from a trustworthy source?\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u2015 Kytka Hilmar-Jezek, author, in Book Power: A Platform for Writing, Branding, Positioning & Publishing<\/em><\/h6>\n
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“Getting information off the Internet is like taking a drink from a fire hydrant.”<\/h5>\n
\u2014 Getting information off the Internet is like taking a drink from a fire hydrant<\/h6>\n
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“Remember, the easiest thing for the reader to do is quit reading.”<\/h5>\n
\u2014 Barney Kilgore, former Wall Street Journal<\/em> editor, quoted in NoTrain-NoGain.com<\/h6>\n
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“When something becomes abundant, it also becomes cheap. A world awash in information is one in which information has very little market value.”<\/h5>\n
\u2014 Paul Krugman, American economist and New York Times<\/em> columnist<\/h6>\n
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“The reader is now driven by the fatigue factor.”<\/h5>\n
\u2014 Ellen Levine, former editor in chief of Good Housekeeping<\/em><\/h6>\n
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“The difficulty in keeping well informed today is not that news is scarce, but that there is so much more ‘news’ each day than the average man can assimilate.”<\/h5>\n
\u2014 Henry R. Luce, founder and editor, Time<\/em> magazine<\/h6>\n
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\u201cOne of the effects of living with electric information is that we live habitually in a state of information overload. There’s always more than you can cope with.\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u2015 Marshall McLuhan, Canadian professor and philosopher<\/h6>\n
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“Seven days without email: Priceless.”<\/h5>\n
\u2014 MasterCard ad<\/h6>\n
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“Certainly the more information we get, the higher the level of ignorance seems to be.”<\/h5>\n
\u2014 Errol Morris, filmmaker<\/h6>\n
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\u201cWe also know that the brain can handle only a limited amount of information at a time; at its simplest, we can think of stress as information overload, so when there’s too much happening, the brain starts to triage, prioritizing, simplifying, and even plain old ignoring some things.\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u2014 Emily Nagoski, sex educator and researcher<\/h6>\n
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“We are drowning in information but starved for knowledge.”<\/h5>\n
\u2014 John Naisbitt, social researcher<\/h6>\n
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“Information is not only renewable, but self-generating. Running out of it is not a problem, but drowning in it is.”<\/h5>\n
\u2014 John Naisbitt, American futurist and bestselling author<\/h6>\n
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“Online multitasking makes us suckers for irrelevancy.”<\/h5>\n
\u2014 Clifford Nash, a Sanford University professor who\u2019s studied the effects of multitasking<\/h6>\n
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\u201cInformation Overload = \u2018information pollution.\u2019\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u2015 Jakob Nielsen, “king of usability”<\/h6>\n
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“46% of Americans agree that a lot of institutions I deal with \u2014 schools, banks or government agencies \u2014 expect me to do too much information gathering in order to deal with them.”<\/h5>\n
\u2014 Pew Research Center<\/h6>\n
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“Information has become a form of garbage. We don’t know what to do with it, have no control over it, don’t know how to get rid of it.”<\/h5>\n
\u2014 Neil Postman, cultural critic<\/h6>\n
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\u201c80% get headaches, insomnia or eye twitches from information overload.\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u2015 National Public Radio<\/h6>\n
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“You\u2019re not more informed. You\u2019re just numbed.”<\/h5>\n
\u2014 Tom Rosenstiel, former Los Angeles Times<\/em> media critic<\/h6>\n
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“I was thinking that information was power. I now regard this as one of the great seductive myths of our time.”<\/h5>\n
\u2014 David Shenk, author of Data Smog<\/em><\/h6>\n
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“In a glutted environment, the most difficult task is not getting one’s message out, but finding a receptive audience.”<\/h5>\n
\u2014 David Shenk, author of Data Smog<\/em><\/h6>\n
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\u201cIt\u2019s not information overload. It\u2019s filter failure.\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u2015 Clay Shirky, American technology writer<\/h6>\n
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\u201cI don\u2019t know how to read any more. I can only read 20 or 30 words at a time before taking out my iPhone and caressing it and snuggling with it.\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u2015 Gary Shteyngart, author, Super Sad True Love Story<\/em><\/h6>\n
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“What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.”<\/h5>\n
\u2014 Herbert Alexander Simon, economist and Nobel laureate<\/h6>\n
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\u201cInformation overload is a symptom of our desire to not focus on what’s important. It is a choice.\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u2015 Brian Solis, principal analyst, Altimeter Group<\/h6>\n
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\u201cWe consume, on average, 15.5 hours worth of media a day.\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u2015 University of Southern California\u2019s Institute for Communications Technology Management<\/h6>\n
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“It\u2019s all right, sweetie. In the information age, everybody feels stupid.”<\/h5>\n
\u2014 Peter Steiner cartoon in The New Yorker<\/em><\/h6>\n
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“Information is not power. If information were power, then librarians would be the most powerful people on the planet.”<\/h5>\n
\u2014 Bruce Sterling, American science fiction writer<\/h6>\n
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\u201cThe information revolution now gives us access to too much information. Our problems are that we\u2019re just overwhelmed, so in some sense we just basically don\u2019t even know where to turn.\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u2015 Jonathan Taplin, American writer, film producer and scholar<\/h6>\n
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\u201cHere’s the general theory: To clarify, add detail. Imagine that. To clarify, add detail. And clutter and overload are not an attribute of information, they are failures of design. If the information is in chaos, don’t start throwing out information, instead fix the design.\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u2014 Edward Tufte, American statistician and professor emeritus of political science, statistics, and computer science<\/h6>\n
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“We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom.”<\/h5>\n
\u2014 Edward O. Wilson, a Harvard professor and biologist<\/h6>\n
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\u201cEveryone spoke of an information overload, but what there was in fact was a non-information overload.\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u2014 Richard Saul Wurman, American architect and graphic designer<\/h6>\n
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“One question: If this is the Information Age, how come nobody knows anything?”<\/h5>\n
\u2014 Woman at a party in a New Yorker<\/em> cartoon<\/h6>\n
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“I think of wisdom in relation to the information age this way. Data organized is information. Information made meaningful is knowledge. Knowledge linked to other knowledge is intelligence. And intelligence granted experience is wisdom.”<\/h5>\n
\u2014 Jim Young, executive, EDS<\/h6>\n
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