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Welcome once again to our Friday’s Food for Thought post. The summer weeks are surely rolling by — oh my, tomorrow is August 1st already! Well, spend some time with us this morning. This post will surely slow down time and bring you to a place of pure peace and comfort. Who are we kidding. This post will most likely do the exact opposite — the theme is about too much information. We live in a harried world where we are overloaded with information. Is this a good thing? We will surely explore this question in today’s FFT post. Oh, and if you could not guess, our recent post about the military being overloaded with too much intelligence influenced today’s post. Enjoy.

What Is “Information Overload”?
Seems like a silly question, right? If you think about it. We have been living in an information overloaded society ever since the World Wide Web took off about 15+ years ago. So, who coined the term “Information Overload”? According to Wikipedia, Alvin Toffler did, and the term refers to an excess amount of information being provided, making processing and absorbing tasks very difficult for the individual because sometimes we cannot see the validity behind the information.

Fighting Data Asphyxiation is Possible
Did you know that information overload can cause confusion, impaired judgment, weakened vision and constipation? Well, we made up that last one. But, the rest is surely true. According to David Lewis of the International Stress Management Association “information fatigue syndrome” is caused by the barrage of data to which we are constantly exposed carries a cost, both physically and mentally. Read more here.

Can We Please Put the Blackberrys Down?
We came across this most enlightening WSJ opinion piece about information overload. A couple of items caught our attention. The first is that Xerox essentially launched the information sharing business culture 70 years ago. My how the times have changed. Now, we are tweeting and Facebooking at an astronomical rate. And, we have a TOUGH time putting down the “Crackberrys.” Did you know that in order to get passengers to pay attention to safety announcements, Air New Zealand decided to show a video of stewardesses and pilots dressed in nothing but body paint. Women in body paint…the only thing that will get us to pry our eyes away from our PDAs?? What is up with that?

Converting Visual Data Into a Meaningful Package
Back in March, PSI Origin (a USGIF member), a company specializing in capturing and transforming Broad Area Persistent Surveillance data into actionable intelligence — bridging the gap from theory to field-level operations — provided a submitted blog post that is very appropriate for today’s theme. What we love about this post is the first sentence: “Acquiring visual data is only half the battle……packaging data for meaningful intelligence is the real challenge.” Kind of nails it. Don’t you think? Read the entire post here.

Information Overload Awareness Day Set for August 12
Did you know that there was an official Information Overload Awareness Day? Heck, man…neither did we. An online event on August 12 has been set to commemorate this special day and it will feature a variety of speakers including noted authors Maggie Jackson (“Distracted”) and Mike Song (“The Hamster Revolution”), executives from such companies as Dow Jones and Morgan Stanley, a CIO from the U.S. Air Force, and Jonathan Spira, chief analyst, Basex. Mark your calendars and read more about the event here.

Were Duran Duran Visionaries?
We never thought we would ask this question, but are they? They wrote and recorded the song “Too Much Information” back in 1993, right before the Internet took off. Did they know that the “too much information” age was around the corner? Our guess was no, but many consider to be Simon LeBon a genius (just kidding). Enjoy!

Happy Friday!

Tags: Basex, Crackberry, Data Overload, Duran Duran, Facebook, GEOINT, Information Overload, Information Overload Awareness Day, Intelligence, PSI Origin, Simon LeBon, Too Much Information, United States Geospatial Intelligence Foundation, Xerox