Summary - The age of information overload.

Title of article: The age of information overload
Author: Alex Hudson
Publisher: BBC
Date published: August 2012

Theme: Online life
Consumption

Summary of text:

The article draws a concern on people spending a considerable amount of time on the Internet and the information they are receiving. It focuses on the amount of information that people can soon and whether or not it is overloadings society and that there is a disjointed effect between digital self and the real physical life.

The article points out that as we sleep for seven hours a day one third of the time that we are awake is spent consuming information the majority of that is digital. Article also illustrates that because there are multiple devices at all freezers information you can receive an concerned more than 24 hours of information day with multiple devices.

Where the concerns of this overload of information is that people are becoming addicted to the online environment and forgetting their place within the real physical world and rather spending time online socialising. Company and app creators are not helping the situation because applications and devices to reinforce and develop the online environment that one lives in.

The article concludes by saying that the Internet is only 23 years old and Tim Berners-Lee describes the Internet as being as important to human rights as water.

Key Quote 2-3:

"Take for example, the tweets passing through Twitter at a rate of around 100,000 a minute. Research commissioned by The Harvard Business Review says that only 36% of tweets from a user’s feeds are worth reading."

"By 2016 there may be the data equivalent of every movie ever made hurtling across the internet every three minutes."

"An academic study by the University of California, San Diego, suggests that current data levels are the equivalent of each US citizen consuming 12 hours of information - or media - each day."


“Things are designed to really grab your attention. When you get a text message, your phone vibrates, it dings, you have to respond to it. It’s like if I wanted to have a conversation with you and I zapped you with a taser and held a stop sign in front of your face." Nick Bilton a New York Times journalist.