information overload

A symptom of the high-tech age, which is too much information for one human being to absorb in an expanding world of people and technology. It comes from all sources including TV, newspapers, magazines as well as wanted and unwanted regular mail, e-mail and faxes. It has been exacerbated enormously because of the formidable number of results obtained from Web search engines.

The Help Manuals Make It Worse
Information overload also includes the excessively intricate and mostly indecipherable manuals that must be read to operate everything from a handheld device to a software application. It boils down to this: the volume of information that crossed our brains in one week at the end of the 20th century is more than a person received in a lifetime at the beginning of it. See user interface.

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(jargon)

information overload - When a person feels unable to read all the information that is presented or available to them, particularly where they need to make decisions based on that information but can't because there is just too much to take in in the time available.