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An Essay on Information Overload \ Esej o nadmiarze informacji 15

(4)    To prioritise the types of information and sources of information to be taped into and get acąuainted with them.

(5)    To minimise information pollution by using thematic information filters, tools for documents classification, clustering and sorting, and installing anti-spam tools.

(6)    To diversify sources of information and beware of affirmation information that llatters its consumers but rarely bears value.

(7)    To reduce the amount of daily amount of time to consume information; notę that “today, you re likely to spend upwards of 11 hours per day to consume information” (Johnson, 2012).

(8)    To use the tools for tracking the carried out activities and measure the amount of time spent on interacting with digital devices (e.g. RescueTime software package can do it in a friendly and efficient way on a personal Computer); this should help to adjust the information intake to ones ‘digital metabolism'.

(9)    To determine and observe the time slots on daily office and home agendas, which are free of using digital devices and intellectual technologies; notę that “average Computer user checks forty web sites a day and switches programs up to thirty six times an hour” (Sieberg, 2011).

(10) Whenever there is a choice between paying attention to a device or access to the internet and heeding to people, a better choice is almost always to work towards people.

The readers interested in devising their own information trophic pyramids, and information diet strategies (perhaps a sort of “infovegan” diet) are referred to the books (Johnson, 2012) and (Sieberg, 2011). Also getting acąuainted with the research on information ecology that is seriously concerned about information overcharge can be helpful; towards this end, a visit to the MIT portal of the Information Ecology Group⁸ can be paid and a reading of a seminal book (L)avenport, 1997) and the paper (Babik, 2008) is advised.

We close this chapter by informing the readers that efforts have been madę under the SYNAT programme^g, which is a strategie initiative of the Polish Ministry of Education and Scientific Research to help the Polish scientific community, scholars, and students to provide them with easy access to scientific information and primary documents and to help them better organise their work also in terms of avoiding information overload (Ryżko & Muraszkiewicz, 2013).

4. Tinal rcmarks

It seems that in a democratic society and capitalist free market economy the major tasks to limit the negative effects of information llood are on the side of information consumers rather than on the side of information generators and disseminators, be they commercial companies, public establishments, or just individuals. ()bviously, for commercial agents profit is the mainspring of their operations, meaning producers always try to address as many potential customers and users as possible. Also non-for profit agents are usually

http://eco.media.mit.edu

http://www.synat.pl