Module 1 - Case Information Networking as Technology: Tools, Uses, and Socio-Technical Interactions Assignment Overview Information overload! The phrase alone is enough to strike terror into the hardiest of managers; it presages the breakdown of society as we know it and the failure of management to cope with change. The media constantly dissect the forthcoming collapse brought on by TMI ("too much information"), even as they themselves pile up larger and larger dossiers on the subject, and we are frequently informed that it is our own damn fault that we are drowning in data, since we simply can't discriminate between the important stuff and everything else. Hence, the info-tsunami warning signs posted all along what we once so naively called the "information superhighway.” Of course, this is arrant nonsense—human beings have been suffering from information overload in varying forms since about the time we hit the ground and found ourselves simultaneously running after the antelope and away from the lion. There's no question that the human mind has a limited capacity to process information, but after several million years we've gotten pretty good at figuring out how to handle a lot. The two basic tricks turn out to be distinguishing between short-term and long-term information storage, and "chunking"—putting things in a limited number of baskets. This isn't primarily a course in the psychology of memory—it's about information tools and systems—but in fact the same things that make our information tools and systems work are the same things that have kept us near the antelopes and away from the lions (mostly) for the last million years or so. So we're beginning this course by thinking about information tools, what makes them like and unlike other kinds of tools, how the concept of a socio-technical system (in which social and behavioral functions shape results as much as does the technology itself) helps make sense of what we're facing, and why the technology just might win after all. Let's start with a little historical review. Amy Blair has recently done a very intriguing summary of just why information overload isn't something that we, or still less our kids, dreamed up—people have been drowning in data for ages regardless of the tools at their disposal: Blair, A. (2010) Information Overload, Then and Now. The Chronicle of Higher Education Review. November 28. Retrieved November 15, 2010 from http://chronicle.com/article/Information-Overload-Then-and/125479/?sid=cr&utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en We thought we had it all nailed down when the information theorists came up with their typology distinguishing between "data" (raw stuff), "information" (cooked stuff), and "knowledge" (cooked stuff that we've eaten). This rather elegant approach did have the virtue of emphasizing that information processing is a human task, even though we might delegate part of it to machinery, and that the tests of that task are the results for humans. It helps retur.