Abstract

In this talk I will ask whether it is true to say that ‘Everyone is suffering from communications overload’. I will ask how we might measure human communication and whether we can come up with a straight forward answer. I will contrast different ways of measuring human expression by looking at how measuring is done in communications engineering and computer science. I will also review arguments about how one might understand and measure communications overload from the perspectives of communications studies and the social sciences more generally, such as anthropology and sociology. I will assess and compare how all these disciplines understand ‘overload’ and explain why some don’t think quantitative measures are relevant. I will then make a bigger contrast between ‘common sense’ and scientific ways of understanding human communication. I will suggest that one of the problems that we have when answering the question, ‘do we communicate too much’, has to do with deciding on the relative merits and values of, on the one hand, this ‘everyday’ or ‘common sense reason’ and, on the other, scientific approaches to this topic. I will suggest that common sense is much more useful and precise than we might think, and science often misleading and imprecise when it comes to the particular topic – what it means when we speak of, and how we measure, human communication. I will remark on the importance of this insight for innovation in the field of HCI . Material for the talk with come from my latest book, Texture: human expression in the age of communications overload (MIT Press).