Starting in the mid of the 20th century, the emergence of contemporary information technologies
has dramatically changed the way information is disseminated and absorbed in organizational
and private contexts. Recent advances in information technology make information
ubiquitously available with the help of novel hardware and software, like mobile devices, corporate
social networks or microblogging services. They enable organizational actors and private
users to access information from multiple sources across a multitude of different computer-based channels.
However, today’s abundance of information does not only result in higher organizational
productivity and an enrichment of its recipients’ lives in general. It also introduces new challenges
as the mental information processing capabilities of human IS users improve not at the
same speed as hardware and software technologies do, being constrained by cognitive limitations
and evolutionary-shaped behavioural patterns guiding the absorption and use of information.
Hence, it appears to be paramount to consider the aforementioned limitations as one
important facet of human information behaviour with respect to a more human-centric use and
design of information systems. Faster and more intelligent data processing capabilities, which
recently have often been expressed with the term "big data", does not automatically lead to a better understanding of mental information processing capabilities of humans. Thus, we propose
to focus on the processes and states that occur when humans process information in their
brain as well.
The entity “information” is a constituent of the Information Systems discipline, thus underlining
the field’s focus on the development and use of technologies that support humans in gathering
and processing information that are required in various business and private contexts.
Unfortunately, however, the analysis and explanation of the relationship between human
technology users and the entity information has never been the discipline’s core research in3
terest. In fact, research on the behaviour of human beings when interacting with information
in computer-based contexts is largely fragmented and frequently generates conflicting results.
Consequently, the goal of this paper is twofold. First, it reviews existing research with respect
to information or information related behaviours. Second, based on the findings of the review,
it intend to demonstrate how the research on computer-mediated information behaviours
could significantly enrich IS research. Thus, we provide a profound and structured overview
of extant research on the relationship between human beings and the entity information in the
IS domain. Then, the article aims at creating intertextual coherence by harmonizing fragmented
pieces of research as well as to identify fundamental research gaps that motivate promising
future research trajectories. The latter will be exemplified with the yet under-researched phenomena
of channel-dependent information seeking, information stopping, and information
avoidance behaviour. Toward this end, the IS literature on information behaviours is analyzed
using a conceptual framework developed based upon a synthesis and extenbsion of previous
work on human information behaviour. Where appropriate, articles from non-IS journals are
integrated into the analysis to complement and extend the findings. The result is a review article
centred around organizing our existing knowledge of human behaviour in relation to the
entity information in computer-based contexts with the overarching goal of advancing theory
development
