CONTENTS
Foreword : Fighting the Good Fight against Information Bloat
Preface
A Note to the Reader
Acknowledgments
Introduction
The Way Work Was
The Age of the Knowledge Worker
Mark Rivington’s Day
A Global Economy
Great Moments and Milestones in Information Overload History
Part I : How We Got Here
Chapter 1 : Information, Please?
Chapter 2 : History of Information
The Information Revolution and the Book
E-readers Rising
After the Book . . . Getting the Word Out
The New News Cycle
Chapter 3 : Welcome to the Information Age
Is Software Holding Us Back?
The Tools We Use
Mid-Nineteenth-Century Tools: Groundwork Is Laid
Twentieth-Century Tools: The Foundation for the Information Revolution
Breakthroughs in Productivity
Online Collaboration Makes Its Entrance
Enter Charlie Chaplin
Enter the Office Suite
An Office for the Twenty-First Century
The Problem with Documents
The Collaborative Business Environment
Chapter 4 : What is Information?
Quantifying Information
Why Information Is Exploding
How Information Is Going beyond Network and Storage Capabilities
Structured versus Unstructured Information
Data Mining to the Rescue?
Chapter 5 : The Information Consumer
Chapter 6 : What is Information Overload?
Meetings: Too Much of a Good Thing?
How Long Has This Been Going On?
More Information – Isn’t that What We Wanted?
Information Overload and the Tragedy of the Commons
The Ephemerization of Information
Chapter 7 : The Cost of Information Overload
In Search of a Management Science
Chapter 8 : What Hath Information Overload Wrought?
Aspects of Information Overload
Information Overload–Related Maladies
The Compatibility Conundrum
Chapter 9 : The Two Freds
Entitlement
Mad about Information
Work–Life Balance
Chapter 10 : Beep. Beep. Beep.
How Much Texting Is Too Much?
Sample Text Phraseology
The Search for Whatever It Is We Are Looking For
Chapter 11 : Heading for a Nervous Breakdown
Thinking for a Living
The Roundtable
How the Other Half Lives
The New Busy Is Heading for a Nervous Breakdown
Part II : Where We Are and What We Can Do
Chapter 12 : Managing Work and Workers in the Twenty-First Century
Chapter 13 : Components of Information Overload
E-mail Overload
Unnecessary Interruptions and Recovery Time
Need for Instant Gratification
Everything Is Urgent – and Important
Chapter 14 : E-mail
The Cost of Too Much E-mail
E-mail and the Network Effect
Reply to All
Profanity in E-mail (Expletive Deleted)
A Day Without E-mail
What to Do With 2.5 Billion E-mail Messages
Deleting E-mail, Deleting Knowledge
Chapter 15 : The Googlification of Search
Search and the Quest for the Perfect Dishwasher
The Search Experience
Does the King of the Watusis Drive an Automobile?
Chapter 16 : Singletasking
Attention
Three Types of Attention
Automaticity
The Supertaskers Among Us
Chapter 17 : Intel’s War
Recent Information Overload Initiatives
Quiet Time: A Time for Thought and Reflection
No E-mail Day
E-mail Service Level Agreement
Chapter 18 : Government Information Overload
The Government’s Information Problem
Information Overload Turns Deadly
A Culture of Secrecy
The Consequences of Not Connecting the Dots
Chapter 19 : The Financial Crisis and Information Overload
No Information Overload in 1907?
Information Overload in the Market
Chapter 20 : The Tech Industry and Information Overload
The Industry Comes Together?
Information Overload Awareness Day
What Software Companies Are Doing
Chapter 21 : What Works Better When
Social Software Tools in the Enterprise
What Should I Use When?
10 Tips to Help Lower Information Overload
Epilogue : 2084: Our Future?
References
About the Author
Overload Stories: The Web Site
Index
The characters and incidents on pages 4-6 and in the epilogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2011 by Jonathan B. Spira. All rights reserved.
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.
Published simultaneously in Canada.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, (978) 750-8400, fax (978) 646-8600, or on the Web at www.copyright.com. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, (201) 748-6011, fax (201) 748-6008, or online at www.wiley.com/go/permissions.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Spira, Jonathan B.
Overload!: How Too Much Information is Hazardous to your Organization / Jonathan B. Spira.
p. cm
Includes index.
ISBN 978-0-470-87960-3 (cloth); ISBN 978-1-118-06415-3 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-06416-0 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-06417-7 (ebk)
1. Knowledge management. 2. Information resources management. 3. Information technology—Management. 4. Business communication—Management. I. Title.
HD30.2.S686 2011
658.4′038—dc22
2010053512
To my parents, who taught me about knowledge, and to the millions of knowledge workers around the world, who inspired me to combat Information Overload.
FOREWORD
FIGHTING THE GOOD FIGHT AGAINST INFORMATION BLOAT
In this book, Jonathan Spira addresses the problem of Information Overload and our own responsibilities for it. But this isn’t just a question of “don’t spam.” People usually create content with some purpose in mind. Sometimes it’s just self-aggrandizement, in which case this book is not for you.
But if you’re sending messages without getting a response, maybe you aren’t thinking enough about the recipient. If you do so, you’ll get more done with less effort and more control . . . because thinking about the recipients helps you determine what actually gets into their heads.
Take how I came to write this foreword. Jonathan had sent me an e-mail politely asking me to write a few notes for his book. In reply, he got this plaintive away message from me: “staving off e-mail bankruptcy: I am traveling and my deferred message liability is around 4000. I’m hoping to work my way through this, but please don’t expect a reply until December 31 or worst case December 32!”
He then wrote again – and didn’t get a reply. I was too busy dealing with the very problem he is describing in this book.
We then chatted in Facebook instant messaging, but I responded with little enthusiasm.
What should people do to cut through the clutter and elicit a response? In the case of Jonathan’s first e-mail, he should have given me much more complete directions. In other cases let’s say if an individual had wanted me to recommend him for a job, he should write the forwarding letter for me – which I could edit if I wanted. Otherwise, all I would have to do is add the recipient to the cc line and hit reply.
In the case of someone who wanted help getting an in with a certain company, he could do the research himself – i.e. list the top management and the board of directors – and ask me if I knew anyone there.
If someone has to write to me a second time – I’m looking through my backlog of unanswered e-mails here! – he should not say: “Did you get my last e-mail?” Instead, he should make it easy for me by resending the whole thing – which should not have been that long anyway! I would say that my response rate goes down by 60 percent if there’s a file attached.
And so on! Thinking about the person you are engaging with will not just clear up information overload; it’s also likely to get you the response you want. This is one of the key points addressed in Overload!
(How did Jonathan actually get me to write this? By calling me! Sometimes realtime voice communication beats all this fancy electronic stuff!)
Esther Dyson
PREFACE
“Why are you so passionate about the problem of Information Overload?” is perhaps the question I have heard most in the past decade.
The answer is rather simple: Information Overload is killing us. It is death by a thousand paper cuts in the form of e-mail messages, documents, and interruptions.
Information Overload and related issues are now mainstream topics. The phrase itself is being co-opted for multiple purposes (many unrelated to the actual problem), and it’s the topic of front-page stories in mainstream newspapers, magazines, and blogs.
No one I know is exempt from the problem as information is all around us. The issue is not only the quantity; it’s also the intensity. Information is also appearing in new and unexpected ways.
Just a few days before I sat down to write this preface, the Web site WikiLeaks released 250,000 classified State Department documents including hundreds of diplomatic cables. The question of right or wrong notwithstanding, my first thought was “How will anyone be able to sort through this quantity of material and make any sense of it?”
In 1971, the New York Times published the Pentagon Papers. At the time, the approximately 7,000 pages supplied by Daniel Ellsberg probably seemed insurmountable, but the knowledge worker journalists at the Times managed to present the material in a comprehensible manner.
Today, anyone can go to the Web and see the actual cables released by WikiLeaks as well as tens of thousands of analyses published by various parties.
The Internet has removed the intermediaries, such as newspapers, that even a mere decade ago would have been the place to which someone such as Bradley Manning, the private in the U.S. Army who is suspected of having disseminated the classified documents, would have turned.
Manning didn’t even need WikiLeaks. Anyone can publish a Web page and content today, and this, of course, is why we have more and more information coming at us from all directions.
The unfortunate reality is, there is no magic bullet for “fixing” Information Overload at this time, and it is likely that we may never fully resolve the problem. In addition, there is a huge financial cost associated with the problem – according to my research at Basex, the knowledge economy research firm where I serve as chief analyst, Information Overload cost the U.S. economy almost $1 trillion in 2010.
While there is relatively little that we can do about Information Overload, we don’t have to grin and bear it. What does help reduce Information Overload and lessen its impact is 1.) raising awareness and 2.) presenting context and history as to why the problem is occurring.
Raising awareness helps because most people are simply unaware of the root causes of Information Overload, such as poor search techniques, unnecessarily copying dozens if not hundreds of colleagues on an e-mail, or calling someone two minutes after sending an e-mail message simply to tell the sender of its presence.
Providing context and history puts things into perspective. The quantity of information has increased in lockstep with advances in technology, beginning with pen and paper and continuing into the Information Age. Not surprisingly, sixteenth-century knowledge workers complained with alacrity about such things as too many books.
In addition, we can also take preemptive steps by teaching knowledge workers more about information and information management and ensuring that they know that their actions (e.g., sending an e-mail to 300 supposedly close colleagues) have a significant impact on their colleagues’ efficiency and effectiveness.
In addition, a new class of workers may be required, namely knowledge workers who are capable of efficiently sifting through the torrent of information, separating the wheat from the chaff, and presenting the important nuggets in an accessible manner. That person might be a librarian, researcher, editor, journalist – the titles are almost irrelevant but the information-swamped world will be grateful.
When I was doing a research project in grammar school, I learnt about the Library of Alexandria, built in the third century BCE. The library was charged with collecting all of the world’s knowledge, the first effort of its kind, and became a home to scholars from around the world. It also had one of the most original (and possibly apocryphal) acquisition policies ever: It confiscated every book that came across its borders (Alexandria had a man-made port and was an early international trading hub) and copied each one, usually returning the copy, not the original, to its owner.
Today, multiple parties are attempting to build a modern-day Library of Alexandria, albeit an online one. Wikipedia, since its founding in 2001, has amassed over 9.25 million articles in 250 languages that, while not books, represent a good part of the world’s knowledge. In a similar vein, Google is assembling the world’s known books online. An official Google blog post from August 5, 2010, stated that Google had accounted for 29,864,880 as of that date. Thus far, it has scanned approximately 10 percent of them.
The concept of the Library of Alexandria (and, subsequently, the New York Public Library, which I frequented during another research project) made quite an impression on me. But I also realized how much information was out there. When I started working at my father’s company, Spiratone, during school vacations, helping select and deploy office automation systems, I began to see how information flowed throughout an organization, or sometimes how it didn’t flow.
The time I spent at Spiratone created an indelible impression of how technology sometimes could work in harmony with business – and sometimes not.
It was in the early 1990s, by which time I had been at Basex for almost a decade, when I began to realize that the spread of then-new technologies within the enterprise, such as e-mail, were probably creating as many problems as they were solving. This contrasted with the prevailing view of such new technologies, which viewed them as a panacea for all the ills of the office.
CNBC interviewed me on productivity issues back in 1993. The reporter, Bob Pisante, opened the segment by saying “It’s not just meetings that are taking up a ton of time, there’s also a problem with mail. And in this day and age, mail means e-mail. You think you’re busy? Jonathan Spira can get 150 e-mails a day.”
If only that were the case today.
A NOTE TO THE READER
At the risk of potentially overloading you with information before you even start reading, I wanted to alert you to two important issues relating to this book.
First, while this book is bound and fixed in time and space, its mission is not limited to these pages. The book’s companion Web site, Overload Stories (www.OverloadStories.com), has been created in order to allow you to share your own experiences and stories about Information Overload and read what others are going through. You will also be able to review updated research and case studies and participate in a dialogue with me on these issues.
Second, I have written this book with the individual knowledge worker in mind. As a result, throughout the book, my references to the knowledge worker are in the singular tense and this requires a singular pronoun, such as he or she. (It is at this point that I am reminded of Mark Twain’s excellent essay, “The Awful German Language,” in which he points out that “a tree is male, its buds are female, its leaves are neuter; horses are sexless, dogs are male, cats are female.”)
To avoid what would be a rather awkward repetition of “he or she” or “him or her” throughout the book and to maintain a modicum of consistency in pronoun usage, I treat the term “knowledge worker” as a masculine noun that requires a masculine pronoun (i.e., I refer to the individual knowledge worker as “he” or “him”). Of course, Information Overload impacts everyone without regard to gender; it is truly an equal opportunity problem.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Despite suffering from significant overload themselves, many knowledge workers have selflessly contributed their time and thoughts to my research over the past ten years which culminated in this book. Without the thousands of knowledge workers who took my surveys, participated in interviews, attended workshops, and sent me their thoughts, I would never have been able to understand the extent to which Information Overload impacts them and at what cost this occurs.
There are a few people whom I must single out by name, due to their unique contributions.
David M. Goldes, president of Basex and a lifelong friend, who has worked alongside me for 22 years studying knowledge workers and knowledge work and kept me focused on the reason we are doing what we do.
Cody Burke, vice president and senior analyst at Basex, who has served as my partner-in-crime since I started to work on Overload! and contributed a good deal of research and thinking that was incorporated in the book.
Basilio Alferow, vice president and editorial director at Basex, who has tirelessly reviewed my writing and made sense of it, even when it made little sense to me.
Greg Andrew Spira, my brother and a veteran of multiple books himself, who was always happy to review at my text and contribute his knowledge of the book-publishing industry.
Nathan Zeldes, president of the Information Overload Research Group, who, first as Intel’s Information Overload czar (a title I created to describe his role) and now from his current position, tirelessly contributed data and his experiences in confronting Information Overload.
Tim Burgard, Stacey Rivera, and Vincent Nordhaus, my editors at Wiley, who provided support, guidance, suggestions, and words of encouragement throughout the process.
Finally, I would like to thank my partner, Daniel Lafler, for his unconditional support and understanding during the preparation of this book.
INTRODUCTION
Information has become the great leveler of society and business. Today, practically everyone is more informed than even the most informed person was a mere 25 years ago yet, paradoxically, knows a smaller percentage of the available knowledge. Governments, too, are far better informed about what other nations are doing (which, we hope, leads to fewer misunderstandings) as well as what the citizenry is up to. Young people in poorer nations – witness India, for example – have been able to capitalize on the flexibility of an information society to create better lives for themselves as knowledge workers, something unimaginable a mere quarter century ago.
Knowledge workers think for a living to varying extents, depending on the job and situation, but there is little time for thought and reflection in the course of a typical day. Instead, information – often in the form of e-mail messages, reports, news, Web sites, RSS feeds, blogs, wikis, instant messages, text messages, Twitter, and video conferencing walls – bombards and dulls our senses.
We try to do our work, but information gets in the way. It’s not unlike the game Tetris, where the goal is to keep the blocks from piling up. You barely align one, and another is ready to take its place.
When computers first began to encroach upon our everyday lives, they were in distant, glass-walled rooms run by scientists in white coats. The closest most of us came to them were punch cards that came with utility bills. Indeed the term “Do Not Fold, Spindle, or Mutilate” became a running gag among late-night comedians (as well as the name of a movie in the 1970s about a computer dating service).
Technology was the source of conflict in earlier films as well. Films, such as Metropolis (1927) and Modern Times (1936), commented on the negative impact of automation in the workplace. Desk Set (1957), where Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn clash over the computerization of a TV network’s research department, presented an epic man versus machine struggle.
Information Overload was first mentioned in 1962 by Bertram Gross in Operation Basic: The Retrieval of Wasted Knowledge. It was predicted by Alvin Toffler in Future Shock (1970). In 1989, Richard Saul Wurman warned of it in his book Information Anxiety.
But Information Overload is no longer a problem of the future; it’s something that we have to address and manage right now.
Indeed, the term “Information Overload” has become part of the vernacular. While spending the better part of a week at the remote Blackberry River Inn in Connecticut to focus on writing this book, I found that people I ran into had a lot to say on the topic. They also had an encyclopedic knowledge of the problems that arise from multitasking (something I cover in Chapter 16) and cited several incidents where texting resulted in train crashes and other accidents.
Two 40-ish women dining in a local restaurant and seated next to me asked me about my visit. When I mentioned the topic of the book, they both started rattling off the dangers of multitasking and the problem of finding accurate information online.
Back at the inn, the chief information officer at a large software company quizzed me endlessly on what he could do to make his workforce more efficient and effective, given the severity of the problem.
The Way Work Was
As our work environment changed and evolved, it was accompanied by a significant increase in the amount of information that was being created and that we needed to perform our jobs.
For thousands of years, work was a matter of subsistence. We worked to eat, to survive, to provide our family with food. Life was simpler then. There was a direct correlation between the success of our work and whether there was food on the table, or even if there was a table. The dawn of the Industrial Age changed all that. We went off to factories and offices as fewer and fewer of us lived off the land.
The way we look at work today is inexorably and somewhat romantically linked to 1950s situation comedies where the father, a distant figure, would leave for work in the morning in his suit and fedora, briefcase in hand, returning promptly an hour before dinner, just in time for his wife to ask “Hard day at the office, dear?” A quiet dinner hour usually followed, along with time to discuss homework with the kids and present various life lessons, all of which were to be resolved in under 30 minutes. (The actual work performed by dear old dad during the day was somewhat nebulous in most cases, but it generally involved a desk, a secretary, and occasionally a cranky boss.)
My father, who was not in a situation comedy, was the CEO of Spiratone, a midsize company in the photographic industry. He typically came home from the office at 5:30 in the evening, but his information-laden briefcase was always heavy with work that included memos, ad copy, correspondence, and other paperwork.
After the dinner hour, he retired to his study to do more work. He usually received a few phone calls from colleagues, and they were expected to be working as well. Invariably, a few times a week, the phone would ring and at the other end was a distant-sounding female voice announcing “long distance from Tokyo, Japan, calling”: The head of his Tokyo office was on the line.
The reality of that age, however, was that most people did not work in offices but held far more mundane jobs. Indeed, in 1950, more people worked in industrial and factory jobs than anywhere else.
The Age of the Knowledge Worker
Today, 78.6 million people in the United States are knowledge workers, a plurality of the workforce. A “knowledge worker” is defined as a participant in the knowledge economy. The “knowledge economy” connotes an economic environment where information and its manipulation are the commodity and the activity (in contrast to the industrial economy, where workers produce a tangible object with raw production materials and physical goods).
Knowledge workers are found at all economic stations. An accounting clerk is a good example of an entry-level or rudimentary knowledge worker. An architect or engineer is an excellent example of a skilled knowledge worker, as is an airline pilot or physician. And a rocket scientist or Nobel Prize–winning economist is representative of the top echelon of knowledge workers.
Of course, not everyone is or should be a knowledge worker, nor is knowledge work performed simply for its own sake.
Factories will still continue to produce products (although these factories will be increasingly robotized and automated), and, as there are some tasks machines simply can’t perform as well as a person, people will continue to be directly involved in the manufacturing process. Knowledge workers may develop product design software that other knowledge workers will then use to design, for example, a refrigerator or automobile, but at the end of the day, a product is still manufactured.
The current economic makeup contrasts sharply with the workforce of 25 years ago where industrial workers represented a majority, and that of the turn of the twentieth century, where manual workers, many agrarian, comprised 90 percent of the workforce.
Mark Rivington’s Day
Mark Rivington woke up at 7 a.m. to a news report on his clock radio, a bit surprised to find himself in his own bed since his job requires so much travel.
He continued listening to the news while he showered and ate breakfast. He was still sleepy since he had been up late studying Spanish online for an upcoming trip to Madrid.
After a five-minute walk to catch the 8 a.m. train, he continued on his way to work, reading additional newspapers on his tablet computer. He also listened to music on the built-in music player.
After arriving at work at 9, he logged into his computer at his desk. He pondered the work he was about to do, sitting in front of his computer, staring at the screen, deep in thought. As he began his work, the phone rang, and he answered the call. Ten minutes later, he stared blankly at the computer screen, unable to recall what he was about to write.
At 9:30, he joined an hour-long departmental meeting in a large conference room. Like most meeting attendees his age (Mark is 27), he listened with half an ear and spent most of his time triaging his e-mail inbox on his smartphone.
The meeting was over at 10, and, back in his office, Mark caught up with industry news.
It was time for another meeting, this time on the Web. Participants from a special task force Mark was on were presenting preliminary findings. Mark had to pay attention to what his colleagues were saying and make his own presentation. After the 90-minute meeting, Mark wondered how he would keep track of everything that was discussed and, more important, had to be done.
Mark had grown up with information bombardment. As a child, he had been left by his parents in front of the television for hours at a time. He knew how to use a mouse before he could write the alphabet with a pencil and spent his preteen years on the Web, constantly messaging friends around the world.
Back again at his desk, it was time to catch up on correspondence. One e-mail – marked urgent – caught his attention. A major issue was developing at a supplier’s factory in Munich, and Mark would have to travel there to resolve the problem.
Mark researches flights and plans a quick trip to Munich for the next day. Since he doesn’t have another meeting until 2:30, he starts researching the problem he hopes to be able to solve. An hour of searches proves fruitless, and he starts to feel overwhelmed by the vast amounts of information on the topic, unable to discern what is accurate and what is not.
His meeting comes just as Mark starts to hit a breaking point. He goes to the meeting and continues his research on his laptop. Everyone is silently tapping away on their laptops or smartphones while two people discuss the meeting topic.
Halfway through the meeting, Mark realizes that one attendee is describing a situation eerily similar to what he will be facing in Munich. He starts taking notes and sends the speaker a meeting request to chat later. The speaker replies a few minutes later (clearly, he was multitasking, too) and a meeting time of 5 p.m. is agreed upon.
After this meeting, Mark needs a break. He relaxes by visiting his favorite hobby discussion forum (high-performance German cars) and participates in several discussions.
As the 5 o’clock meeting time comes closer, Mark realizes he needs to try to assimilate all of the information he has on the factory problem in order to make the best use of his time. He curses the poor search tools but uses the knowledge gained in the meeting to improve his search terms, and he begins to find useful information.
The meeting at 5 proves fruitful, and Mark realizes how difficult it would have been to get the information he needs if not for the chance meeting earlier.
At 6 p.m., Mark remembers he has a customer presentation due tomorrow – before he leaves for Europe. He starts to research new industry figures and 90 minutes later realizes he has enough information for his presentation, but it’s far from done. He stops and goes to the gym.
Mark, finished with the gym by 9, catches the late train and starts to review the information for his presentation on his tablet. By the end of his commute, he has his presentation ready.
By 10 p.m., Mark is home, preparing dinner and checking e-mail. Already, there are over two dozen messages from colleagues many time zones away. And he still has to pack for his trip.
A Global Economy
In today’s global economy, information has become both a currency and a product. Somewhat contrary to the normal laws of supply and demand that dictate the value of other currencies and products, information has become self-perpetuating, in part because we have built technology that easily allows us to create new information without human intervention.
In fact, we’ve become so good at generating information that it becomes effortless and, as a result, we end up creating far more than we can manage.
Let me take a step back for a moment. While some may contend that there’s no such thing as too much information per se, what does exist without question is an inability to manage the flow of information so that people can easily find what they are looking for and not feel overwhelmed. This is Information Overload.
Information Overload throttles productivity, reduces our capability to absorb and learn, puts our physical and mental health at risk, and interferes with personal and business relationships.
Research that I conducted at Basex, the research firm where I serve as chief analyst, has found that the costs of Information Overload are extremely high, in terms of both dollars and human costs. Indeed, according to research published by Basex in December 2010, Information Overload cost the U.S. economy $997 billion per year.
As the tools we use beep and blurt, day in and day out, one competing with the other for a moment of the knowledge worker’s day, they take a toll, not only emotionally and intellectually but on the bottom line as well.
The changes in how we use and view information that will happen over the next half century will not only reshape the globe but turn it inside out. This will in turn change how we view the concept of home, our home and work lives, our business and personal relationships, and perhaps even our national loyalties.
GREAT MOMENTS AND MILESTONES IN INFORMATION OVERLOAD HISTORY
Prior to the 1800s, the tools used by knowledge workers required much effort on the part of the user. Indeed, the earliest knowledge workers used stone, chisels, quills, and parchment to store information. To them, these tools were true innovations and dramatically increased their ability to create, share, and distribute knowledge.
Transmitting information over a distance in earlier days was also tricky. Sending a message might have involved beacon fires, flags, carrier pigeons, drums, mirrors, or even a man on a horse. Clearly, despite the occasional hard drive crash, today’s users have it relatively easy by comparison.
Our timeline navigates through many centuries of recording information and details the many innovations that allowed mankind to create, store, and distribute more information to more people. Of course, the easier it became to publish information, the more overloaded we became.
Today, innovation comes quickly and today’s state-of-the-art tools become yesterday’s news in a nanosecond. What will be available even a few years down the road is hard to fathom, and what we will be using 20 or 30 years hence is the stuff that science fiction is made of. I have no doubt that the individual who updates this timeline in 2084 will look back at today’s rather primitive tools and smile knowingly.
| Year |
Development |
Why it was relevant |
| 4000 BCE |
Clay tablet |
Allowed information to be recorded and stored for the first time |
| 3500–3000 BCE |
Papyrus and reed brushes or pens (Egypt) |
More portable and easier to use than clay and stone |
| 2697 BCE |
Ink (Tien-Lcheu, China) |
Further advanced the recording of information |
| 1600 BCE |
Alphabet (Sinai) |
Made written language possible |
| First century |
Codex (Rome) |
Made information truly portable |
| 105 |
Paper (Ts’ai Lun, China) |
Made information lightweight and portable |
| 700 |
Quill pen (Seville, Spain) |
Simplified writing |
| Ca. 1440 |
Movable type (Johann Guttenberg) |
Made mass reproduction of information possible |
| 1565 |
Pencil (Borrowdale, England) |
Made writing utensils less expensive and easier-to-use |
| 1605 |
Newspaper (Relation aller Fürnemmen und gedenckwürdigen Historien, Strasbourg) |
Made possible the distribution of large amounts of news and information |
| 1642 |
Pascaline Adding Machine (Blaise Pascal) |
Automated arithmetic |
| Year |
Development |
Why it was relevant |
| Ca. 1725 |
Punch cards (Basile Bouchon and Jean-Baptiste Falcon) |
Improved method for controlling machines such as looms and, a century later, served as a means of storing information |
| 1792 |
Tachygraphe semaphore, renamed Télégraphe in 1798 (Claude Chappe) |
Allowed communication of information over distance |
| 1806 |
Stylographic Writer aka carbon paper (Ralph Wedgwood) |
Made it possible to create multiple copies of documents easily |
| 1808 |
Typewriter (Pellegrino Tumi) |
Originally created for the blind, a much faster way to write down information |
| Year |
Development |
Why it was relevant |
| 1830–1835 |
Electric Telegraph (Joseph Henry) and Morse Code and Electromagnetic Telegraph (Samuel F.B. Morse) |
Enabled real-time communication over a distance |
| 1839 |
Photography (Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre and William Henry Fox Talbot – separately) |
Made the capture of images possible |
| 1844 and 1861 |
Commercial telegraph line between Washington D.C. and Baltimore (Morse) and Transcontinental Telegraph Line (Western Union) |
Expanded the ability to communicate real-time information across the continental United States |
| 1858–1866 |
Transatlantic cable |
Enabled real-time communication across the Atlantic |
| 1868–1871 |
Commercially successful typewriter and QWERTY keyboard (Christopher Sholes) |
Changed the face of correspondence |
| Year |
Development |
Why it was relevant |
| 1870 |
Universal Stock Ticker (Thomas A. Edison and Western Union) |
Enabled the transmission of stock price information over telegraph lines, remained in use through 1970 |
| 1876 |
Telephone (Alexander Graham Bell) |
Made real-time voice communication possible |
| 1887 |
Punched card tabulating machine (Herman Hollerith) |
Allowed processing of information stored on punch cards |
| 1895 |
Telediagraph (Ernest A. Hummel) |
Enabled images to be sent over great distances using electrically-scanned shellac-on-foil originals |
| 1914 |
Belinograph (Édouard Belin) |
Enabled the scanning and transmission of an image using ordinary telephone lines |
| 1915 |
Transcontinental telephone line (AT&T) |
Enabled voice communication across the U.S. |
| Year |
Development |
Why it was relevant |
| 1924 |
Telephotography (fax predecessor) |
Enabled the transmission of pictures via telephone or telegraph lines |
| 1930 |
Television |
Made transmission of moving images possible, brought information streams into homes |
| 1936 |
Gegenseh-Fernsprechanlagen, public videophone service (Deutsche Reichspost) |
Made public video calling possible although the service lasted only a few years |
| 1938 |
Xerography (Chester Carlson) |
Led to the plain-paper photocopier |
| 1940 |
Spread-spectrum communications (Hedy Lamarr and George Antheil) |
Enabled secure communications and a signal with a wider bandwidth |
| 1946 |
ENIAC Electronic Digital Computer (J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly) |
Inaugurated the age of general purpose digital computing |
| Ca. 1953 |
Repetitive typewriter (M. Schultz Company) |
Enabled mass production of documents |
| 1957 |
Sputnik satellite (USSR) |
Enabled global telecommunications |
| 1959 |
Xerox 914 plain paper copier |
Enabled easier and higher quality copying of information |
| 1960 |
DEC PDP-1 (Programmed Data Processor) Mini-computer (Digital Equipment Corp.) |
Moved computing from the data center into the office |
| Year |
Development |
Why it was relevant |
| 1961 |
IBM Selectric Typewriter |
Marked the beginning of desktop publishing thanks to the ability to switch fonts (via different typing elements) |
| 1962 |
oNLine System (NLS) (Doug Engelbart and Stanford Research Institute) |
Introduced hypertext browsing, online editing, mouse, windowing, information organized by relevance |
| 1962–1968 |
Packet switching networks (Paul Baran, Donald Davies, Leonard Kleinrock – separately) |
Removed the possibility of a single point of outage as data is split into packets that can then take different routes to a destination |
| 1964 |
Transcontinental microwave communications (AT&T and Western Union, separately) |
Enabled the replacement of land lines, leading to lower telecommunications costs |
| 1964 |
IBM Magnetic Tape Selectric Typewriter |
Allowed data to be stored in a typewriter for word processing |
| 1964 |
IBM System/360 mainframe computer |
Expanded scientific and commercial computing applications via a family of mainframe computers |
| 1966 |
Telecopier 1 fax machine (Xerox) |
Made possible the scanning and transmission of documents over telephone lines |
| Year |
Development |
Why it was relevant |
| 1969 |
ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency, U.S. Department of Defense) |
Led to modern-day Internet |
| 1971 |
E-mail (Ray Tomlinson at BBN) |
Allowed individuals to send and receive messages electronically |
| 1971 |
Floppy Disk (IBM) |
Enabled easy movement of information and data from one computer to another |
| 1973 |
Westar commercial communications satellite, (Western Union) |
Heralded the age of satellite-based communications |
| 1973 |
Xerox Alto (Xerox Palo Alto Research Center) |
Introduced the graphical user interface and the metaphor of a desktop to computing |
| 1973 |
Graphical User Interface, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center |
Replaced text commands, making computers easier to use |
| Year |
Development |
Why it was relevant |
| 1973 |
Mobile Phone (Martin Cooper and Motorola) |
Enabled placing and receiving phone calls from outside the home or office without using wires |
| 1973 |
EARS laser printer (Xerox) |
Increased the speed and quality of office printing |
| 1973 |
International connection to ARPANET (Univ College of London and Royal Radar Establishment) |
Presaged a global Internet |
| 1973 |
IBM 3340 Direct Access Storage Facility hard drive (code-named Winchester) |
Led to inexpensive local storage |
| 1973 |
Ethernet (Xerox) |
Enabled local area networking |
| 1973 |
FTP |
Made possible the copying of files from one host to another |
| 1973 |
TCP/IP (Robert Kahn and Vint Cerf, Stanford) |
Enabled more efficient transmission and routing of traffic |
| 1974 |
Hypertext (Ted Nelson, in Computer Lib/Dream Machines) |
Enabled the World Wide Web and an easy-to-use method of sharing information via embedded references (hyperlinks) in text |
| 1974 |
Altair 8800 Personal Computer |
Brought computing into the home |
| 1974 |
Telenet (BBN) |
Made packet-switched networking available to the general public |
| 1976–1977 |
Apple I and Apple II personal computers |
Popularized home and hobby computing |
| 1978 |
WordStar (MicroPro International) |
First commercially successful word processing software |
| Year |
Development |
Why it was relevant |
| 1979 |
VisiCalc (Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston) |
First spreadsheet, revolutionized how data is organized and presented |
| 1980 |
Usenet |
Allowed users to read and post messages and served as predecessor to today’s online Internet forums |
| 1980s |
WordPerfect, XyWrite, MultiMate, Microsoft Word, and pfs: Write |
Solidified the migration of word processing from dedicated hardware to PCs |
| 1981 |
IBM Personal Computer |
First standards-based PC, moved computing to the desktop |
| 1981 |
Xerox Star (also known as the Xerox 8100 Information System) |
Introduced a graphical user interface, icons, folders, a mouse, Ethernet networking file servers, print servers, and e-mail |
| 1982–1983 |
GRiD Compass 1101, and Gavilan SC laptop computers |
Presaged a new movement in portable computing |
| 1984 |
Breakup of AT&T/Divestiture of Bell System (Judge Harold Green and the U.S. Department of Justice) |
Created a deregulated and competitive environment in the U.S. telecommunications industry that led to the Information Age |
| 1984 |
MacWrite |
Introduced users to WYSIWYG word processing and graphical user interfaces |
| 1985 |
MacPublisher |
Enabled computer-based WYSIWYG desktop publishing |
| Year |
Development |
Why it was relevant |
| 1986–1988 |
NSFNET (National Science Foundation) |
Created an open network that served as the backbone of the Internet by allowing academic and regional networks to connect |
| 1989 |
HTML [Tim Berners-Lee at CERN (Conseil Européenne pour la Recherche Nucléaire – European Laboratory for Nuclear Research)] |
Enabled the development of the Web and gave users the ability to describe the appearance of Web pages using tags |
| 1990 |
Archie Internet search |
Allowed users to index and find FTP files |
| 1990 |
Microsoft Windows 3.0 |
Inaugurated a widespread change to GUI-based operating systems |
| 1991 |
Wide Area Information Servers |
Enabled indexing and search on remote computers |
| 1991 |
World Wide Web (Time Burners-Lee at CERN) |
Enabled browsing of information using a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessible over the Internet |
| 1992 |
Apple Newton personal digital assistant |
Enabled personal information to be stored in a handheld device |
| 1993 |
Mosaic browser |
Opened up the Web to the general public |
| Year |
Development |
Why it was relevant |
| 1994 |
IBM Simon |
Enabled mobile access to information by combining a phone, PDA, pager, and fax |
| 1994 |
Justin’s Links from the Underground (Justin Hall) |
Laid a foundation for popularity of blogs and bloggers |
| 1995 |
Microsoft Internet Explorer |
Brought Microsoft into the browser business |
| 1995 |
Alta Vista (Digital Equipment Corp.) |
Enabled better search through a searchable, full-text database of a large portion of the Web |
| 1996 |
Nokia 9000 Communicator |
Spawned the smartphone industry |
| 1997 |
SixDegrees.com |
Set the stage for the rise of Friendster, Myspace, Facebook, and LinkedIn among others |
| 1997 |
Google |
Provided better search results through the incorporation of relevancy |
| 1998 |
Open Diary (Bruce Ableson) |
Allowed readers to post comments on blogs, leading to an increase in popularity |
| 1999 |
Wi-Fi 802.11b standard |
Enabled a revolution in wireless computing devices |
| 2001 |
3G standard for mobile communications |
Enabled faster mobile data communications as well as simultaneous voice and data |
| Year |
Development |
Why it was relevant |
| 2002–2004 |
Friendster, MySpace, Bebo, LinkedIn, and Facebook |
Allowed users to share and interact with information based around social networks |
| 2002 |
Handspring (later Palm) Treo 180 |
Influenced the development of the modern smartphone |
| 2002 |
BlackBerry |
Enabled mobile access to information by combining a phone, PDA, secure e-mail, texting, and Web browsing |
| 2004 |
Voice-over-IP (VoIP) |
Marked the beginning of accessible Internet telephony |
| 2006–2007 |
Twitter |
Enabled a new type of short messaging culture |
| Ca. 2006 |
Cloud computing |
Allowed knowledge workers to access systems and information from anywhere |
| 2007 |
Apple iPhone |
Created an innovative Web-based model for apps and information sharing on mobile devices |
| 2010 |
Apple iPad |
Rejuvenated the long-nascent tablet computer market and drove acceptance of larger portable computing devices with smartphone-like operating systems |
PART I
HOW WE GOT HERE
All men, by nature, desire to know.
—Aristotle
