The composite index marked a five-month low and the manufacturing index a seven-month-low in August (figure 2). The Purchasing Managers’ Index peaked in summer and has been declining since then (figure 2). In ancient and medieval times, the nobility and academics almost exclusively faced information overload-related problems, as Blair (2012) and Levitin (2014) suggested.ĭespite the positive news around private consumption and corporate investments, economic sentiment in the Eurozone is on the decline.

In particular, the rise of IT and the use of internet services have resulted in an expansion of information overload-related problems for all social ranks. Before these radical innovations, the issue of information overload was limited to a wealthy and privileged elite. ‍ Two radical innovations supported the rapid increase in the availability of information and the decrease in information search-related costs: Gutenberg’s printing innovations and the rise of information technology (IT). As Blair (2012) noted in her review article, even in the thirteenth century, scholars complained of “the key ingredients of the feeling of overload which are still with us today: ‘the multitude of books, the shortness of time and the slipperiness of memory’” (Blair 2012, p. 1967 Eppler and Mengis 2004), but the phenomenon is not confined to the modern world. Information overload occurs when decision-makers face a level of information that is greater than their information processing capacity, i.e., an overly high information load (Schroder et al.

Ai to summarize text