Quantifying Information Overload in Social Media and its Impact on Social Contagions

Information overload has become an ubiquitous problem in modern society. Social media users and microbloggers receive an endless flow of information, often at a rate far higher than their cognitive abilities to process the information. In this paper, we conduct a large scale quantitative study of information overload and evaluate its impact on information dissemination in the Twitter social media site. We model social media users as information processing systems that queue incoming information according to some policies, process information from the queue at some unknown rates and decide to forward some of the incoming information to other users. We show how timestamped data about tweets received and forwarded by users can be used to uncover key properties of their queueing policies and estimate their information processing rates and limits. Such an understanding of users' information processing behaviors allows us to infer whether and to what extent users suffer from information overload. Our analysis provides empirical evidence of information processing limits for social media users and the prevalence of information overloading. The most active and popular social media users are often the ones that are overloaded. Moreover, we find that the rate at which users receive information impacts their processing behavior, including how they prioritize information from different sources, how much information they process, and how quickly they process information. Finally, the susceptibility of a social media user to social contagions depends crucially on the rate at which she receives information. An exposure to a piece of information, be it an idea, a convention or a product, is much less effective for users that receive information at higher rates, meaning they need more exposures to adopt a particular contagion.Comment: To appear at ICSWM '1

Using Software Agents to Raise Awareness and Lower Information Overload in a Multi-user Collaborative Environment

Ubiquitous devices provide users with notifications that continue to blur the distinction between work and personal activities and can lead to information overload. This research aims to support users of multiple collaborative and social systems who may experience this, by designing and evaluating a personal software agent to support the user and ameliorate the effects of overload. A technique uniting personas and Empathy Map has been applied to model typical user behaviours, goals and pain points, which will inform the design of a solution to manage interruptions and information overload

Information overload and perceived productivity amongst tertiary students

Abstract: Information overload, as a result affects individuals’ ability to effectively process the constant flow of information and perform required tasks. Over decades, technological advancement has increased the production of information, leading to increasing levels of information overload. Recent research propose that the abundant flow of existing information and how it interrupts the manner in which people conduct tasks can affect decision making, productivity and how individuals perform tasks. The purpose of this study was to determine the perceived relationship between information overload and perceived productivity amongst Information and Knowledge Management undergraduate students at the University of Johannesburg (UJ). The sample used consisted of 205 undergraduate Information and Knowledge management students. The collected statistical data was analyzed using SPSS software. The data suggests that the availability of a large number of information streams does not have a noticeable effect on the perceived performance of the students in the sample

Information Diffusion Power of Political Party Twitter Accounts During Japan's 2017 Election

In modern election campaigns, political parties utilize social media to advertise their policies and candidates and to communicate to electorates. In Japan's latest general election in 2017, the 48th general election for the Lower House, social media, especially Twitter, was actively used. In this paper, we perform a detailed analysis of social graphs and users who retweeted tweets of political parties during the election. Our aim is to obtain accurate information regarding the diffusion power for each party rather than just the number of followers. The results indicate that a user following a user who follows a political party account tended to also follow the account. This means that it does not increase diversity because users who follow each other tend to share similar values. We also find that followers of a specific party frequently retweeted the tweets. However, since users following the user who follow a political party account are not diverse, political parties delivered the information only to a few political detachment users.Comment: The 10th International Conference on Social Informatics (SocInfo 2018

Deriving Personas Based on Attitudes to Interruption and Information Overload

Ubiquitous devices provide users with notifications that continue to blur the distinction between work and personal activities. This research aims to understand how users manage - and would like to manage - such notifications in order to design better support. A methodology was developed to create design scenarios from a survey of people’s attitudes and perceptions. The survey asked participants how they interact with various collaborative, social and communication services, and about their views regarding trust in those services, privacy and how they have experienced information overload. A two-step clustering technique was then used to identify distinct archetypes within the respondents resulting in 5 personas. A technique uniting personas and empathy map has been applied to model typical behaviours, goals and pain points, which will inform the design of a solution to manage interruptions and information overload

IMPACT OF DIGITAL TECHNOLOGIES ON PEOPLE HEALTH AND MEANS TO AVOID INFORMATION FATIGUE

Internet become as basic component of daily routine. Although the Internet has many positive aspects, most people spend too much time on their smart devices spending less time playing outdoors. A decrease in physical activity not only sets up information fatigue, which leads to increase in diseases of the nervous and heart systems. Many of scientific articles deal only with the features of information fatigue and its consequences for human health, however research articles that analyze tools that can protect against information fatigue have not been found. Only commercial companies advertise their software, which help monitor what users are doing on their computer. Novelty of the article is that it explores how information technology affects young people lives and analyses software that can help control working time with these smart devices also. 

Focus and social contagion of environmental organization advocacy on Twitter

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is freely available from Wiley / Society for Conservation Biology via the DOI in this record.  Agriculture, over-exploitation and urbanisation remain the major threats to biodiversity in the Anthropocene. The attention these threats garner among leading environmental NGOs (eNGOs) and the wider public is critical in fostering the political will necessary to reverse biodiversity declines worldwide. Here, I analyse the advocacy of leading eNGOs on Twitter, and show that it is dominated by the major threats of climate change and over-exploitation, and the minor threat of plastic pollution. The major threats of agriculture, urbanisation, invasions, and pollution are rarely addressed. Content relating to over-exploitation and plastic pollution is more socially contagious than other content. Increasing emotional negativity further increases social contagion, while increasing emotional positivity does not. Scientists, policymakers and eNGOs should consider how narrowly focused advocacy on platforms like Twitter will contribute to effective global biodiversity conservation. Article impact statement: Reversing global biodiversity declines requires focus on major threats, but leading environmental NGOs often focus on minor threats. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.Leverhulme Trus

Evolution of Conversations in the Age of Email Overload

Email is a ubiquitous communications tool in the workplace and plays an important role in social interactions. Previous studies of email were largely based on surveys and limited to relatively small populations of email users within organizations. In this paper, we report results of a large-scale study of more than 2 million users exchanging 16 billion emails over several months. We quantitatively characterize the replying behavior in conversations within pairs of users. In particular, we study the time it takes the user to reply to a received message and the length of the reply sent. We consider a variety of factors that affect the reply time and length, such as the stage of the conversation, user demographics, and use of portable devices. In addition, we study how increasing load affects emailing behavior. We find that as users receive more email messages in a day, they reply to a smaller fraction of them, using shorter replies. However, their responsiveness remains intact, and they may even reply to emails faster. Finally, we predict the time to reply, length of reply, and whether the reply ends a conversation. We demonstrate considerable improvement over the baseline in all three prediction tasks, showing the significant role that the factors that we uncover play, in determining replying behavior. We rank these factors based on their predictive power. Our findings have important implications for understanding human behavior and designing better email management applications for tasks like ranking unread emails.Comment: 11 page, 24th International World Wide Web Conferenc