As readers of this blog will know, one of my enduring interests is how the concept of information appears in different domains. One aspect of this is the much-studied relation between information and the complex, and the multi-faceted, and arguably over-used, concept of entropy; see an older paper for background. Interest in this topic shows… Continue reading “A delicate tension between physics and information”; information and entropy revisited
Tag: information overload
Overload, attention and medieval diagrams
Information overload, and its attendant pathologies of information, wrongly thought to be a product of the digital age, of social media, and the like, have received much comment in recent years. With attention focused on the ways in which the digital environment removes many of the informational frictions in the communication chain, the long history… Continue reading Overload, attention and medieval diagrams
Overload in the time of Covid
My colleague Lyn Robinson and I have been writing about issues of information overload for many years now, our latest output being a review article forthcoming from Oxford University Press. The Covid-19 situation, and the amount of information (and misinformation and disinformation) that has accompanied it, has created a new public interest in overload. We… Continue reading Overload in the time of Covid
Dark Side: is the news fit to print ?
I wrote a while ago about our new paper on the dark side of information: information overload, information anxiety, information avoidance and the like. Subsequently, the University's press office picked this up as something likely to have mass appeal, and a short piece has appeared in the University newsletter. The process by which this appeared… Continue reading Dark Side: is the news fit to print ?
Dark Side of Information
My colleague Lyn Robinson and I have a paper appearing in the latest issue of Journal of Information Science, continuing our long-standing interests in the 'dark side' of information. The paper analyses the literature on a variety of issues, from information overload, information avoidance and library anxiety to the madness of crowds and the paradox… Continue reading Dark Side of Information
The Occasional Informationist 