Attention Literacy in the Age of Information Abundance

Abstract

Information fatigue syndrome is a very common disorder presently for individuals who have to crawl a huge number of sources to get their required information due to information explosion or ‘info-pollution’ which is to be understood as a state where a person gets baffled and becomes unable to form appropriate decisions with too much information. Research in psychology, cognitive science, and neurosciences confirm that the biological limitations of human beings restrict a person from paying attention to several objects simultaneously. The present study is an endeavour to examine this issue through suggestive measures to decipher the various aspects of human attention. Document analysis technique has been adopted to show that only information literacy is not enough for the library and information science professionals to sustain in the attention economy; instead, attention literacy and fruitful application of different aspects of attention are very much essential too. The existing discourses of library and information science lack the notion that a shift of focus from information literacy to attention literacy has become necessary of late. The present study fills this knowledge gap and makes some recommendations regarding the fruitful application of attention literacy in different activities of libraries and information centres to sustain the attention of the users.