Information Overload Problem - Essay Example

Introduction 20 years earlier than the phrase “World Wide Web” was invented and 30 years prior to My Space's befriended the world, Herbert Simon, a Nobel Prize-winning economist foretold a change from an Information era to what every one is experiencing today: “In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes,” he wrote in 1971. “What information consumes is obvious . . . the attention of its recipients.” In the emerging “attention society,” we growingly turn to experts and trusted friends to assist us filter through and uncover the cultural content which interests us. In the modern economic world, attention economics which is a model to the information management that recognizes human attention as being a scarce commodity and employs economic theory in solving different information management issues. Simon (1971) noted that, a lot of people who design information systems inaccurately represent their designing problem as an information scarcity instead of attention scarcity. Owing to that, these designers built information systems which excel at offering increasing information to individuals, while what is in reality required are systems which excel at sieving out what is inconsequential or inappropriate information (Simon, 1996) In the recent past, Simon’s description of information overload problem as being an economic problem has become a lot more popular. Today, business strategists are increasingly adopting the word “attention economy” (Davenport & Beck, 2001). Some scholars such as Zack, 2003; Goldhaber, 1997, have even conjectured that “attention transactions” will substitute financial operations as the centre of economic systems. Researchers in information technology have as well adopted the notion, and are starting to explore mechanism designs that build on the notion of generating property rights as being attention. This essay will try and critically evaluate Herbert Simon words in the modern world through analyzing the information technology development and how relevant his words are in information management. Currently, the attention economics seem to be mostly interested in the issue of how to get consumers to embrace promotion. Adler, & Winograd, T. (1992) Conventional media advertisers pursued a model which suggested that consumers underwent a linear course they described as AIDA; Attention, Interest, Desire and Action. Therefore, Attention is a critical and the initial phase in the processes to convert non-consumers. Given that the expenses to convey advertisement to consumers is at present satisfactorily low that extra advertisements can be conveyed to consumers than the consumers can process Consequently, attention of the consumer becomes a scarce resource that has to be allocated. Due to this in there was an increased rush of realization in 2005 regarding attention economics application in the marketing: O'Reilly media in 2005s stated that Attention Economy will be the focus in 2006 meeting of their annual Emerging Technology conference. Consultants began to provide professional services in relation to attention economy as applied in promotion. According to Zack (2003) stated that all through the consumer markets, consumer attention has become scarce thus, most tactically vital as a resource of the value chain. The Attention scarcity is essentially remodelling the economics of nearly all industries it impacts; starting with the media business. (Zack, 2003) Goldstein (2005) states that presently attention economy entails growing consumer products or services do not cost anything to re-produce the information. The probrem which the providers face is how to add up valuable intangibles that can be able to be reproduced without any cost. These vital intangibles, according to Goldstein (2005) are: 1. Immediacy; priority accessibility, instant delivery 2. Personalization; tailored simply for you 3. Interpretation; support as well as guidance 4. Authenticity; how can one be certain it is the genuine thing? 5. Accessibility; whenever, wherever 6. Embodiment; live music, books 7. Patronage; "paying purely as it feels excellent", e.g. Radio head 8. Findability; given that there exists numerous books, vast films, enormous songs, and thousands of equipments and many thousand of things which appeal to our attention, and most of them are for free, it thus becomes a valuable aspect to locate the consumer. (Goldstein, 2005) Managing information pollution is another issue in the information being placed on the web. One application views different types of information for example advertising and spam as a type of pollution to information or some negative externality. In relation to economics, externality is seen as a by-product coming from production process which imposes burdens to parties apart from the projected consumer of the product. An example can be seen in pollution occurring to water as well as air which are negative externalities that impose huge burdens to the environment and more so to the society. Coase (1960) explained a market based approach to control externalities. Coase stated that, the radio frequency intrusion is a type of negative externality which could be managed through the formulation of property rights. His approach in managing externalities necessitates the cautious property rights specification and a definite set of regulations for the preliminary allocation of these property rights. After achieving this, a market system can in theory control the externality trouble. The answer is not essentially straightforward in its use to media contents (Hay, 1996). Electronic mail spam is another aspect that has recent concern in the increasing availability of information. A lot of scholars have suggested handling spam like “information pollution”; the researchers have also suggested that Ronald Coarse’s thoughts should be used to manage it. It cost the spammers very small amount of money to sent big volumes of e- mail messages, this id due to the fact that cost of sending e-mails are at many times spread out to the internet providers who are involved in distribution of these e-mails.(along with the recipients who have to spend their attention handling the e-mails). Mangalidan (2002) clearly states that, consequently, sending out vast spam is a seen as a rational strategy; even if a merely 0.001% of the recipients of the e-mails are translated into a deal, a spam promotion could be profitable to them. Spammers are obviously demanding precious attention from the potential clients; however, they are evading paying for a reasonable fee for the attention owing to the present design of the e-mail structures. One approach this may be executed is through costing senders a little charge for each e-mail which is sent. Frequently known as “sender bond”, it may be nearly fee for an promoter to transmit one e-mail massage to one recipient, however, sending the same e-mail massage to 100 recipients would then cost him 100 times much more. To expound on this point, an experiment was carried out in Britain to study the usage-founded e-mail expenses. The result indicated senders of the e-mails spend more in making attempts to target their e-mail to recipients who possible can value the massage they receive, this results in placing the cost of sieving what is suitable to the sender and not the receiver. (Zack 2003) Closely correlated is the thought by Fahlman (2002) to sell small fees or “interrupt rights,” for a right to require an individual's attention. The charge of these rights might differ depending on the interrupted: for example interrupt rights charge for a chief executive of a Fortune 100 corporation would most probably be extraordinarily costly, whereas interrupt rights charge of a school student may be less expensive. Charges could also differ for a person depending on situation, maybe going up during the demanding holiday period and declining during the boring period of summer. “Interruptees” might decline collecting their amounts from family, friends and some other welcoming interrupters. Loder; Van Alstyne & Wash (2004) suggested another proposal in this stratum, is through formation of “attention bonds”, little warranties that various messages would not be wasting of a recipient's precious time, put in escrow at the occasion of sending the massage. Similar to granters of the interrupt rights, those who receive could then trade in their bonds to indicate to the dispatcher that a particular message was a misuse of their precious time or opt not to trade them in to indicate that more messages would be appreciated. For the people who have supported attention markets to control spam on the internet have claimed that what they suggest is better choose to manage information systems. In case where an agreement regarding whether the spam message is a pollutant or not. An example is where by the private and non profit organisations apply short text messages or e-mail. Another example is the use of these e-mails to get a political campaign which many people see it as spam while other users view this as a legitimate appilication. Laws opposing spam placed the authority to undertake this assessment in the government, whereas technological solutions such as filtering technologies place the power to private firms or to the technologically savvy consumers. A market-based answer, in contrast, permits the prospect of a person concession over the value of a particular message instead of a one-sided decision taken by the controlling body. Loder; Van Alstyne & Wash (2004) observe that, this negotiation itself uses attention and moreover brings with it an attention charge. Page (1998) discusses about Web spam, since search engines currently have turned into the main means to find and access information or data on the internet, high standings in the outcome for particular inquiries have become precious commodities, owing to the capability of the search engines to centre a searchers' interest. Just like some other information structures, web search is susceptible to pollution. As Page (1998) states since the Web environment includes profit seeking schemes, attention catching strategies develop in reaction to search engines algorithms. Singhal (2004) estimates that, successful utilization of these strategies, identified as web spam, has a potential of business worth $4.5 billion annually. As Goldstein (2005) observes, given that nearly all key search engines at present depend on some sort of Page Ranking (recursive tallying of hyperlinks to a web site) to establish search results rankings, a market in regarding formation and selling of hyperlinks has presently emerged. New market competitors participate in many different practices which are known as; 1. Link spamming 2. Reciprocal linking 3. Link farming Singhal (2004) critically observes that, the financial incentives are same as those of e-mail spam; the expenses for creating a vast amount of links are very little, subsequently even an extremely small conversion percentage (proportion of searchers who connect on a spam-enhanced search result) could be beneficial. Singhal (2004) further observes that costs spam has been able to be divided between the search engines. The search engines are today given a task of spending a lot of finances and work to come up with programs to detect. Another point entails the searchers, who are faced with the problem of using more time to decide the correct results form what the download, this is due to the fact that search engines do not completely evade spasm. However, Davenport & Beck, (2001) states that, an effort of altering the economics of certain category of web spam is a “no-follow” aspect for hyperlinks that makes search engines to overlook those links for the reasons to rank the results. The hope is that the webmasters along with web chat software makers will execute systems which mechanically include the “no-follow” aspect to any hyperlinks not within a site holder's express control. The outcome would be increasing the expenses of generating spam links, because spammers would merely be capable to create links on those sites they control. (NoNoFollow.net, 2005) Nonetheless, as antagonists of the “no-follow” attribute reveal, whereas this solution might make it increasingly simpler for search engines to be able discover link spam; it fails to appreciably alter the incentive arrangement for the link spammers. Until 100% of the present systems are improved to sustain the standard, provided that some vital bunches of spammable sites are present, link spam is bound to persist. Besides, the “no-follow” aspect does not fight reciprocal linking or link farming. There is as well a philosophical matter of if hyperlinks of site commentators (as contrary to the site owners) ought to be handled as ‘second-class.’ NoNoFollow.net (2005) adds that this will “lead to the claim that the attribute heists commentators' earned attention” Goldstein (2005) clearly observes that, there is another issue concern, which is related to the question of what should be done regarding the politically related link campaigns which are circulated by politicians. Presently the main search engines are not treating these messages as web spam; however this decision is made independently by private firms. An opportunity for negotiating over the issue of what is suitable utilization of attention which is expressed through hyperlinking is not given. Thus, whether an approach which is market-based may offer a more flexible approach of handling these ambiguous areas remains a subject of debating. In the current information concepts, Generation lead sales is another important aspects Jones (1998) states that, the recognition that, the attention focused through search engines is a valuable product has resulted to the formation of the compensated inclusion concept, whereby search engines cost advertisers who want to be included in their hyperlinks to their search sites. The foremost type of paying inclusion is by making payments for a certain performance. In this scenario those who advertise will provide bids to sell the rights of their hyperlinks to be appear in the outcomes for a specified search subject The winner of auction subsequently pays the search engine the settled upon price for each user who pursue their hyperlink. With the introduction of compensated inclusion, profit-making web sites might prefer to legally paying for attention of searchers, instead of trying to sabotage search algorithms. (Jones, 1998) Paid inclusion concept, and also other pervasive advertising systems for example Yahoo! and Google's Ad sense, work by taking the consumer attention as a valuable property which is belongs to specific search engine. This is to some extent unlike the anti-spam utilizes of attention property rights, that treat a person's attention as his/her own property. (Goldstein, 2005) Another aspect is the ROOT Markets, which is a new approach used to generate lead sales. This approach views a consumer's attention as a property of the ROOT market. ROOT Markets was founded early on 2005. It intended to produce a profitable trade for the selling of information concerning an individual attention (to the media) and intent (to purchase products/services). A person can document his/her on-line attention information through installation of a web browser extension which chronicles browsing history. According to Goldstein (2005) the information which has been recorded can later be available to on the attention market to the investors and the advertisers so that they can buy them. The major variation with the existing web advertising concept is that the individual consumers and not only publishers both can trade attention; in addition, the third-party investors are able to effortlessly get into the market to be engaged in arbitrage. However, whether ROOT Market’s efforts to form an attention exchange model will be a success or not is a matter of time. The inevitable reality of Attention Scarcity is true today; Savolainen (1999) observes that, if the main motivating factor of the kind of structured activity is scarcity then possibly, it could be branded an economy. Thus attention scarcity is particularly a good example. Paying attention means some amount of comprehending and getting whatsoever is being prepared or articulated. Therefore, only an attentive creature could be a foundation of attention, besides only a sentient creature very alike to us is possible to be able of any factual understanding, as well as of an adequate rank of paying attention. For this rationale, the sum of attention existing for each capita will at all times be inadequate, regardless of what one does. To Contractor & Eisenberg (1990); Eisenhardt (1989) the increasing importance on attention as well explains other aspects of our present times explain effects of the transition tidily. It was one time thought that increasing productivity would result to gradually short working days. Indeed, during the 1960's people were asking the question of what will be done with all the impending leisure, as it was being considered as a serious social issue. However, since then, whether working or not everybody is so busy. The divide amid work and family, work and recreation, which has distinguished the industrial economy, is fast eroding, and ushering in attention economy where no free time. At present, performing counts more than production as in the previous routine way of factory production; because performance entails your entire personality. Mangalindan (2002) states that, an individual is usually not prepared except maybe when giving attention to somebody else, which to some extend requires efforts and certainly needs time. (Mangalindan, 2002) Stohl, C. (2001) indicates that, compared with financial businesses, attention businesses on the Web is far more abundant. Money does not essentially weaken in its value, that is to say attention economy does not lead to inflation, recession or deflation. Rather, attention economy makes money to lose its significance, simply as noble kingdom titles have lost their significance over time. As for the stock market it may not necessarily fail, the shareholders might just simply lose their interest, stopping to buy and sell in equal proportions. Looking critically at the present one can visibly see these aspects already taking place in our present times. Today, as we have already discussed what is being exchanged is definitely attention; it may be real as well as illusory, which is more than in direct monetary transactions or direct material production. The time which people are spending pursuits is more directly connected to the attention economy. As Hay (1996); Goldstein (2005) observes, the latest practices are now almost completely in operation for some, while many more are putting these functions in place. Singhal (2004) gives an account when the feudal period was ending; he narrates that, the splendour and show of the nobility attained a point never before achieved; the most stunning body armour; the most splendid knight contests, the most sophisticated ceremonies among competing nobles; the most dazzling marriages; the greatest attention in noble family. However by that time nobility had lost each of its true function or significance. Singhal (2004) further observes that, consequently at present, as we see the stock market going increasingly upwards, when financial wealth itself appears a basis of celebrity more than before, when a company being the first on Forbes 500 list appears the pinnacle of excellence, when each basketball megastar requests a deal which is a million extra than the previous witnessed one, we appear to be a lot more dazed by wealth than before. Flanagin & Metzger (2001) adds that, just as we appear to be a lot more intrigued with material commodities than before. Nevertheless these attentions are shallow as well as faddish. They are symbols of dissolution not of a magnificent prospect for the cash economy. Even the people themselves speak of increasing craving for attention, and the call for it too. Money is currently slightly more numbers, a single number amongst many, moreover as a basis of long-lasting attention money can fade instantaneous. Attention economy is now here and more entirely so each day. Conclusion From the essay it can be deduced that, attention economics entails re-thinking marketing and re-conceiving businesses. Attention economics has the ability of reshaping business economics. Yet again, with only some noteworthy exceptions, attention economics is still in its earlier stages. Attention economics begins with making an acknowledgment that, when products as well as information flourish, attention of consumers becomes a scarce resource, every individual has got the same amount of time in a day, thus where he/she will decide to apportion his/her attention increasingly will be determined by who fashions economic value for the individual and who obliterates the value (Giddens, 1990). To quote the Herbert Simon words “in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes”. In the present day economic world, it can be deduced clearly that attention economics which has recognized consumer attention has a scarce property that needs to be valued. As Davenport & Beck, (2001) Concludes, Simon’s account of continued information excesses in the market as being an economic problem has become a lot more acceptable. 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