CIAO DATE: 05/2012
June 2010
Dr. Fingar made the comment above to highlight the challenges that “the explosive growth of the amount of information that is out there” now present to the analytic and policymaker communities—as illustrated by the fact that official People’s Republic of China (PRC) statistics from 2003, the last year they were published, put the number of China’s periodicals at 11,193. However, although Fingar did not say so, there is some chance that his project thirty-one years before may have been driven, in part at least, by the intelligence community’s recognition that there was already too much information. In 1976, the Church Committee Report (here as photocopies and here as searchable text) had observed that “not only are analysts swamped with information, but the consumers also are inundated with intelligence reporting, both ‘finished’ and ‘raw.’ The volume of paper degrades the overall effectiveness of the product, since there is simply too much to read, from too many sources.” Indeed, according to an internal Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) “study of studies” done the year before Fingar’s project, the “information explosion” had been identified—using that term—as a problem as early as the “mid-1960s.”
Resource link: Strategies—Good and Bad—for Navigating Information Hyperabundance [PDF] - 598K