13. Writing Task 1.2. Essay

In the writing part of the exam you will have to choose one task, respectively, Task A or Task B. You will have a chance to take a look on both tasks and decide which one you prefer. Now to help you get prepared for this part of the exam, study Task B and answer multiple choice questions. This will enable you to feel more confident about writing an essay in a real exam.

Task B

Read the following extract from a research article concerning the problem of information overload.
Write an essay in which you:

 

There is no single generally accepted definition of information overload. It is a slippery and highly contested concept. It is easy to give numbers to show the increasing volume of information, but the problem is not just the amount. It is also to do with diversity, complexity, choices, confusion, and harm caused by information. It is notable that these factors are present in metaphors often used for overload, which include flood, deluge, smog, and explosion.

There is a recurring question as to what exactly everyone is overloaded with. Is it information, data, documents, ideas, or ideologies? Commentators suggest that people are drowning in information (or data) but lack knowledge and often quote T. S. Eliot’s lines “Choruses from the Rock”: “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? / Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” This is not a new question. The information explosion in early modern Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries was variously regarded as a dramatic increase in the number of books, the amount of descriptive facts, and the number of authoritative voices (Rosenberg, 2003).

Overload has generally been explained and defined in rather pragmatic and informal terms; for example, Edmund and Morris (2000) and Eppler and Mengis (2004) give typical lists for their time, mainly characterized as an unmanageable volume of information. […]

Relatively few have invoked a formal or philosophical approach. […] Spier (2016) examines overload using the ideas of Horkheiner and Adorno, concluding that overload is a feature of a capitalist culture industry, whereby “the increase in standardised cultural messages in the media leaves individuals with fewer capacities for reflection and critical thinking” (p. 394) and whereby individuals are active agents in their own overloading, in that they actively consume more information artifacts than they can interpret or understand. […]

A statement by the International Federation of Library Associations (2017, n.p.) suggests that “the exponential growth in the availability of information brought to us by technological advances brings not only promise, but for many a sense of information overload and frustrations linked to a lack of confidence in using digital tools.” Here, overload is taken as being caused by technology delivering too much information, which is made worse by a sense that there is not adequate control over the flood.

More precisely, information overload is the situation that arises when an individual’s efficiency and effectiveness in using information (whether for their work, studies, citizenship, or life generally) are hampered by the amount of relevant, and potentially useful, information available to them. The information must be of value or it could simply be ignored, and it must be known about and made accessible or the overload will only be potential, although the latter situation could certainly cause anxiety or fear of missing out, or FOMO (Dhir et al., 2018; Jones & Kelly, 2018; Przybylski et al., 2013). The feeling of overload is usually accompanied by a perceived loss of control over the situation and often by feelings of being overwhelmed. Savolainen (2006, 2007) points out that these feelings are often related to a perceived lack of time to deal with all the information at hand.

Wilson (1995) defined overload as the situation in which someone knows that relevant information exists but knows that they cannot access and use it properly because of time constraints. Time pressures have been mentioned as a specific cause of overload in numerous studies, for example, among health service managers (MacDonald, Bath, & Booth, 2011) and board-level directors (Merendino et al., 2018).

 

 

1. Which approach would most likely weaken task fulfilment?

2. Which paragraph focus best follows the introduction?

3. What shows effective paraphrasing?

4. Which sentence best uses ideas from the source text?