Note Talkers

I just came back from my CS 4001 class, which is an ethics class for software engineers. Usually we talk about different things software developers have to deal with (safety vs. meeting dead lines, fallacies in arguments, privacy issues, etc).

Today, we talked about visual arguments and ways they can be misleading. I won’t bore you with the detail, but basically the professor went over some graphs and highlighted some problems. Over and over, the biggest problems with the graphs was too much information (either too many graphs on one page or too much in one graph). This undermined the entire reason for graphs and charts.

This got me thinking that Information Overload is all around us (TV, websites, blogs, etc). So, if it is so prevalent, is it undermining things? In Part 2, I will examine my own personal experiences with this but for now, I wanted user opinion. What do you think? Do you think Information Overload is around us? If so, give some examples and how you combat it.