A Preliminary Step in Understanding the Nature of a Harmful Information-Related Condition: An Analysis of the Concept of Information Overload

Abstract

The amount of online content to which people in reasonably affluent nations have access is increasing at an astonishing - even alarming - rate. Recent studies show, for example, there were 550 billion pages on the World Wide Web in 2001 and that, by January 2005, 11.5 billion pages of the much larger number of existing pages have been publicly indexed. In 1990, there was an online world, but no websites in it. Traditionally, it has been assumed - at least within mainstream Western philosophy - that information is good in virtue of being information; that is to say, merely having an informative nature is a sufficient condition for its being properly characterized as good. Librarians were the first to see something wrong with the idea that information is essentially good, but they are by no means the last. Psychologists, economists, policy-makers, sociologists, philosophers and ordinary people are all becoming concerned that we have too much information. In particular, they are concerned that we are overloaded with information - something that cannot happen if information is, by its very nature, a primary, intrinsic, or instrumental good. But what is information overload? This essay attempts to provide a philosophical explication of the concept of information overload and is therefore what philosophers call conceptual analysis - a task that, along with normative ethical analysis, is distinctive to Anglo-American style analytic philosophy. The methodology is the traditional one associated with conceptual analysis: to identify the deeper metaphysical implications and presuppositions associated with our ordinary use of the relevant terms, which include the terms information and overload.