The nature of the glut: Information overload in postwar America

Today, complaints about information overload – associated with an overwhelming deluge of data – are commonplace. Early modernists have reacted to these concerns by showing that similar ones have arisen before. While this perspective is useful, it leaves out what was novel about the concept of information overload, which relied on a historically specific model of the human being. I trace the term’s history back to 1960, when the American psychologist and systems theorist James Grier Miller published his article on ‘information input overload and psychopathology’. In Grier Miller’s usage, the idea of information overload signalled as much a reconceptualization of human beings as communication channels whose capacity could be overwhelmed as it did concerns about the volume of reading material to manage. Through his work, and the broader subsequent adoption of the term in academic and journalistic venues, I show how ‘information overload’ reflected intellectual and social trends specific to its time.