Is there much academic research on the issue of information overload?
A doctoral student at MIT Sloan, Melissa Mazmanian, has done research on this, not yet published. She is working on a co-authored article with Wanda Orlikowski, a professor of IT at Sloan, and me on the use of BlackBerry devices by about 30 workers in one financial services firm. The BlackBerry tends to be seen by them as a way of reducing stress in the present because it is better to get alerts on a BlackBerry than to come back to a computer later and find there’s a disaster. But the other side is the the unintended side-effect of putting more stress on them in the longer term, because they have so little downtime. They all complained about how they are never away from it. So, while they loved their BlackBerries, they paid a price in long-term stress. Have you seen any thoughtful responses to this problem? Sometimes blogging and IM have been forbidden by managers, or companies are hesitant to use such approaches. Some organizations adopt wikis so everyone sees everything going on, but
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