Our work brings two important elements of novelty to this literature: a group-level and production-focused analysis.Īlthough a large literature on the effect of information overload at the individual level exists, group-level analyses are rare. Despite its considerable breadth, the literature on information overload usually focuses on the individual level, and often takes the perspective of the consumption of information. Scholars from different fields-neuroscience, cognitive science, information science, management science and computer science-have looked at the issue of information overload from different perspectives. Information overload can be defined as the state in which one cannot make sense or act upon additional stimuli. The effect of cognitive limits on information processing is certainly not a recent discovery but, with the recent rise of digital communication technologies, its broader implications on interpersonal communication are less well understood. Likewise, physical constraints in the visual and cognitive system limit our processing speed of written texts. The size of the working memory, for example, corresponds to approximately seven discrete items. The information-processing capacity of humans is, however, limited. This often results in our continuous exposure to a barrage of text messages, videos and sound. Social media enable people to access a virtually unlimited quantity of information from a virtually unlimited set of sources.
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