By Mohsen Goudarzi.
The Age of Interruption came after Information Age. This age has focused on communication technologies and media with the specific characteristics including Information overload and inattention among media users. In this short essay some research fields of this term has been focused.
In 2006, The New York Times published an essay titled “The Age of Interruption” which caused public spread of the term. That essay has stated “Continuous partial attention is when you are on the Internet, cellphone, or BlackBerry while also watching TV, typing on your computer and answering a question from your kid.
That is, you are multitasking your way through the day, continuously devoting only partial attention to each act or person you encounter.” Therefore, in the age of interruption, the media spread huge amount of information and the users have less cognitive heed to the world.
Recent studies of the age of interruption have focused on learning field. Ellen Rose (2010) did a research concerning the relation between the age of interruption and the youth, people who are facing different information and have less attention to around. She argued teachers should pay attention to multitasking of their students.
The approach of this research is pathological and positive. Other researchers also have done optimistic research about media technologies and multitasking users. For example, Lin (2009) stated that hyperlink structure of the Internet might improve learning process and users’ creativity. In contrast, the age of interruption has a kind of negative perspective, inherently.
Information overload is an internal characteristic of the Interruption age; the aspect which did not get enough researching attention. Alvin Toffler was the first who used the term Information Overload. In this condition, understanding and making decision might be difficult.
Before generalization of the interruption age in 2006, many scholars have worked on information technologies and their role in much more and faster information spreading. Anyway, others have focused on its negative effects; for example, Speier (1999) stated that information technologies would increase the tensions in working place.
Accordingly, Graham (1999) in the book “The Internet: a philosophical inquiry” has argued that in the Information overloading situation, getting correct and credit information could be hard. In this condition credit and correctness of information is doubtful.
In other words, people may find information quickly, but information validity is questionable. Moreover, Kovach (2010) talked about “Information anxiety” because of information overload. Information anxiety means having gap between necessary information and information that we think is necessary.
Therefore, we have passed information age and entered interruption age. Based on aforementioned facts and researches, information overload and inattention users are inherent characteristics of the Interruption age. In this condition, we have learned different information, but we do not know about its correctness and validity. We also never know the real reason of learning these things and information.
