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10 Mieczysław Muraszkiewicz

Information overIoad occurs when the amount of input to a system exceeds its processing capacity. Decision makers have fairly limited cognitive processing capacity. Consequently, when information overload occurs, it is likely that a reduction in decision cjuality will occur.

This formulation pays attention to two aspects caused by a vast quantity of information, namely to the inability of processing it because of insufficient processing capabilities and its negative influence on the faculty to make decisions. Noteworthy, both aspects refer to the limits of cognitive capacities of the person who is subject to the information overload. Incidentally, this definition can be directly applied also to machinęs that can be exposed to information overloads, too. One of the observations madę by Toffler in his book (Toffler, 1970) was that technology and information flows grow faster than people can absorb and tamę them, which consequently have to lead to emotional tensions, stress, and diso-rientation. The years coming after Toffler s notę proved he was entirely right and the phe-nomenon of information overcharge has become commonplace. Metaphorically speaking, the information sword of Damocles that hanged over our minds has already fallen and, as neurologists clearly confirm it, has been changing our brains. We shall come back to the impact of information overload on the neural structure of the brain later on in this chapter. The readers who are interested in understanding the concept of information overload from various standpoints, different contexts, and its effects of on individuals, organisations, and societies are referred to the portal of Information Overload Research Group² and also to the portal oflnformation Overload Research Centre³.

het us thence ask: What/Who is responsible for the information deluge and for information overload? The answer to the first part of the question is that the culprits of the information flood are media, various types of intellectual technologies, and networks along with easy access to them, create and propel the information deluge. The answer to the second part ofthe question is that information overload is mainly a result of inappropriate intake of information, in other words, the responsibility lies on the side of information receivers and users. Needles to present here intellectual technologies that help and speed up authoring, copying, publishing and disseminating multimedia information produced by individuals, groups of hobbyists, special interest groups, professional media agencies, corporations, administration, etc. for they are well known and their users are counted in hundreds of thousands, millions or even morę. The popularity of such tools as various text and image editors, calculation spreadsheets, graphical presentations editors, email, instant messaging, videoconferencing, tools for video elips making and publishing, etc. along with social services, of which Facebook has gained the status of almost universal social communication facility, has become a remarkable social, economic, and political fact. What is interesting is the amount of information generated by these tools and trans-mitted throughout the world via the wireless and stationary internet. In order to show the dynamics of information llow on the internet we quote statistics showing what happens there over 60 seconds⁴:

168 million emails are sent; 694,445 searches on Google;

http://iorgforum.org

^:i http://infonnationoverloadresources.com ⁴ http://www.go-gulf.com/blog/60-seconds