Infoglut

Infoglut refers to the availability of vast and constantly accumulating disorganized data that is hard to navigate through or draw conclusions from. Infoglut is generally a large but mostly useless clutter of information that takes the form of an interruption or distraction to the normal flow of informational messaging or the current task at hand. It is generally associated with the feeling of being overwhelmed by the excessive amounts of information being presented, devoid of any meaning or patterns. Therefore, it is closely related to the concepts of Information Overload and Information Anxiety. Infoglut is classified by some, notably by Luciano Floridi as an Epistemological problem, which is a broader philosophical concept dealing with the theory of knowledge and perception. Floridi has described Infoglut as -

"Infoglut means that at a certain point the whole system does not absorb anything."

The growth of technology and rapid increase in ability to distribute as well as access information, and the shift in focus towards "Big Data" has been the primary factor in causing an excess or "overload" of information. Consequently, the effect of being rendered unable to absorb information due to the sheer mass of information available has grown into a large ethical issue that has stemmed from technological and informational advances.

Origin and Evolution

Infoglut is derived from the words “Information”, referring to facts and data and “Glut”, derived from “Gluttony” which suggests abundance and excessiveness. The words have been put together to form the hybrid Infoglut. Having appeared in several published works since, the term was most recently publicized by Marc Andrejevic's book "Infoglut: How Too Much Information Is Changing the Way We Think And Know", which was published in 2013.

Early Publications

The origins of the word date as far back as the early-mid 1990s, where it has been mentioned in several articles and books. Thomas John's book "Managing the Infoglut: Information Filtering Using Neural Networks" and Michael Marien's article "Infoglut and competing problems: Key barriers suggesting a new strategy for sustainability" were both published in 1994 and indicate the widespread use and research surrounding the term, a decade before the World Wide Web was discovered.

The Information Age

The Information Age (also known as The Computer Age, The Digital Age, The New Media Age), started in the 1970s and is still going on today. It follows on from the Industrial Age that preceded it and has its title due to the rapid transition from the global economy's focus on industrialization to informational technology. In this era, the computing power, storage and memory capacity as well as speed of computers have risen exponentially, facilitating the abundance of information that now exists. Since the onset of the Information Age, the rise in information and computation has led to a rise in innovations, data analysis and has paved the way for further job creation and economic globalization. The full effect on the economy is not yet fully understood and is still largely debated.

Research and Publications

Books

Since the 1990s, there has been many books that extensively discuss Infoglut and its effects,

Marc Andrejevic's Book On Infoglut, 2013

positives and negatives and ways to curb its downsides using advanced technology. "Managing the Infoglut : Information Filtering Using Neural Networks" by Thomas John exemplifies the kind of work that existed ahead of its time regarding both Infoglut and Neural Networks, terms that have come to light in the 21st century with the rise of Artificial Intelligence. The book discusses the dangers of too much information and the speed with which data can accumulate, and how to maintain the ability to efficiently retrieve information from within the data, through the use of an "electronic superhighway." Marc Andrejevic's "Infoglut : How Too Much Information Is Changing the Way We Think And Know" was the latest book on Infoglut that caused a major wave, and is seen the cornerstone for material on the subject by many. The book is said to expand on the various strategies to deal with information overload and "big data," and how these strategies are connected and the new forms of control they enable.

Articles

Articles on the subject include “Turning an Info-Glut into A Library” by Robert Pool, written in 1994, that discusses converting the overload of inforamtion caused by infoglut into a positive and usable source of data . In 1997, David Shenk wrote an article called "Data Smog : Surviving the Info Glut" which similarly highlights the dangers and drawbacks of the Information Age and how it leads to Information Anxiety . In 1998, The Harvard Journal of Law and Technology published a paper called “Internet Infoglut and Invisible Ink: Spamdexing Search Engines with Meta Tags” by Ira S Nathenson, which drew upon the works of Shenk, amongst others . There have been articles throughout the 2000s including "The Profession of IT - Infoglut" by Peter J. Denning in 2006 and "Infoglut" by Nathan Zeldes in 2009.

Parsing Through Infoglut

Due to the excessive amount of information that people are being fed today, it is important that there are ways to go through all of this information and understand without being overwhelmed. Data miners help with going through this excessive amount of information in order for users to get the information they need. In other words, data miners help people make sense of aspects of information overload that the common eye would not recognize . Another way in which people can get through the excessive amount of information that the internet gives is by getting technology that helps to prevent this infoglut from getting to the users. This means technology that stops the unnecessary information, phone calls, spam, and many other aspects from getting to users. It is up to individuals to take steps to parse through infoglut because as society progresses infoglut will just increase, therefore users must be proactive regarding this manner .

Ethical Issues

The rise in Information has also seen a host of related ethical issues surface along with it. Primarily, Infoglut hampers people's decision-making abilities by offering too many details and information, the surplus of which leads to high levels of indecisiveness a long loop of searching. This has led to a various attention deficit issues within people. There is also a rising conflict between information and privacy, as many people do not believe that with the constant growth in personal and public, it is possible to protect individual privacy to the extent that it was before. It has also raised environmental concerns, since managements and corporations are said to have increased their usage of paper, given the high volume of information needed to be documented tangibly.

Luciano Floridi

Luciano Floridi has repeatedly considered Infoglut to be a larger Epistemological problem, while pointing out specific ethical problems that arise with big data. In a lecture delivered at Oxford University, Floridi asked the splitting question "Does respect for individual's privacy require respect for privacy of the group to which the individual belongs to?". He believes that there are a plethora of ethical questions and dilemmas that arise with growing data and that the matters of group privacy and individual privacy have several points of intersection that can be potential grey areas or problem points moving forward. Floridi has further pointed out, that Infoglut means that beyond a certain point, a system is not able to comprehend or absorb any more due to the sheer mass of information it is being fed. He says that at a point, while it might be possible to discern that the data is half right and half wrong, it might be impossible to state which half is which.

Information Entropy

Information entropy is the destruction, pollution, and depletion of information objects. The concept of Informational Entropy was coined by American Mathematician Claude Shannon. It is the measure of uncertainty within an event or topic. Generally, the lower the amount of information that exists within the scope of the event or matter, the higher the certainty. However, due to constantly growing rates of accumulating information, the level of information across subjects has increased vastly, leading to higher entropy and uncertainty.

There has also been an increase in individual entropy caused by the discrepancy between the speed at which digital information is being computed and transferred and people's personal rate of processing information. Economist Herbert A. Simon has been quoted stating along similar lines that a “wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” and “an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients.”

Information Fatigue Syndrome

Information Fatigue Syndrome was coined in an article titled “Information Overload: Causes, Symptoms and Solutions,” for the Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Learning Innovations Laboratory (LILA), by Joseph Ruff. Information Fatigue Syndrome is a direct result of the decreased effectiveness in decision making process caused by the excessive increase of information pertaining to the possible outcomes of decision being made. In the article, the dearth of attention created by an abundance of information is treated as a clinical illness, and it suggests its symptoms while offering its cures and proactive measures against it.

A list of symptoms include:

Poor concentration

Multitasking resulting in diminished productivity

Hurry Sickness

Heightened irritability or rage symptoms

Over simulation resulting in a mental trance like state

Compulsion related to checking online media and messaging sources

Stress and lowered immune responses

Data As A Commodity

The increase in volume of information has led to multiple large scale cases of invasion of privacy, where personal data and information has become a traceable commodity, for the sake of greater consumer information, leading to better targeting and profit making ventures. Facebook Cambridge Analytica Scandal of 2018 came as a huge shock to millions of users of the platform who's personal information was potentially compromised in favor of data collection, leading to concerns that this case was just scratching the surface of such informational transactions. This marked a critical shift in thinking of data, not as resource but as a tradable commodity, leading to greater fears that people's individual privacy was at stake while companies treated it as tradable in exchange for monetary value.

See Also

• Information Ethics
• Information Overload
• Luciano Floridi