Information overload and information appreciation across news, entertainment, and personal communication

The advent of digital information communication technologies (ICTs) has created an unprecedented abundance of information across news, entertainment, personal communication, and other media contexts. While prior research has emphasized negative outcomes such as information overload, positive responses to abundance remain underexplored. To address this gap, we developed and validated the Information Overload and Information Appreciation Scale (IOIAS) using a mixed-methods design that combined focus groups and two surveys in German-speaking Switzerland (N = 2,049). The IOIAS captures both negative experiences of overload and positive experiences of appreciation, providing a tool to compare these responses consistently across different media contexts. Applying the instrument, we found that appreciation for abundance was about twice as common as overload in news, entertainment, and personal communication. Contextual differences were modest: overload was slightly more frequent in news, while appreciation peaked in personal communication. More pronounced differences emerged across age, with younger people reporting higher levels of both overload and appreciation, whereas gender, education, and income differences were minimal. Overall, the findings suggest that while overload is a real concern for some, appreciation constitutes a more widespread response to information abundance. Thereby, overload and appreciation are not opposites but can co-occur, underscoring the ambivalent ways in which people experience today’s information-rich environments.