[A humble request: If you can, please donate to help me carry on tracing word histories. Thank you.]

 

The phrase information fatigue designates apathy, indifference or mental exhaustion arising from exposure to too much information—especially stress induced by the attempt to assimilate excessive amounts of information from the media, the Internet or at work.

The phrase information fatigue occurs, for example, in the conclusion to Brain storms, an article “on information overload”, by Victor Keegan, published in The Guardian (London and Manchester, England) of Tuesday 5^th November 1996 [Guardian 2: page 3, column 3]:

We were promised by the likes of Al Gore, deputy president of the US, that the electronic miracles promised by the Internet would lead to universal and affordable access for all. This was intended to usher in a golden age in which the biggest gulf between the rich and poor—the information gap—would be eliminated. The information revolution would beget an egalitarianism that traditional capitalism had failed to deliver.
It hasn’t happened. So far. All we can see at the moment is a global war as multimedia giants like Microsoft, Murdoch, Bell—joined now by British Telecom and MCI—and the entertainment companies battle it out for corporate supremacy. Yet behind all this, the digital revolution is still capable of empowering the individuals as never before.
To solve this problem is the glittering prize of politics, not least for New Labour, for whom it implies a digital route towards equality of opportunity which does not involve wholesale demolition of existing institutions. But there are still powerful vested interests working to resist it. Middle management (as one example) will still resist sharing information with superiors—who are often only told what they want to hear—or with subordinates. After all, knowledge, as never before, is power. In the end, information fatigue may be a small price to pay for preserving it.

The earliest occurrences of the phrase information fatigue that I have found are as follows, in chronological order:

1-: From Nature in the raw, but it lacks a single vision, a review by Dennis Pryor of the television documentary series Nature of Australia, published in The Age (Melbourne, Victoria, Australia) of Saturday 28^th May 1988 [Saturday Extra: page 20, column 5]:

What we get is a televised reference book. The commentary ploughs on, example after example of feeding, courtship and copulating. Sometimes it becomes hypnotic to the point of boredom. You find yourself suffering from information fatigue.

2-: From This dedicated trendophobe just can’t face the fax, by Mike Duffy, published in the Detroit Free Press (Detroit, Michigan, USA) of Wednesday 30^th November 1988 [page 9B, column 1]:

It’s happening again.
There are chic trends abubbling and I’m on the outside looking in. Once again, I’m the hopeless life-style rube in a fast-paced, ever-changing, new-and-improved, fad-addicted modern world. Fortunately, this does not bother me one bit.
Like my previously expressed distaste for car phones, I have a newly hatched fax phobia. Where others see an exciting new twist in the communications revolution, I see information fatigue and clutter.

3-: From the column Way of the World, by Auberon Waugh, published in The Daily Telegraph (London, England) of Monday 4^th February 1991 [page 19, column 4]—the following refers to the Gulf War, i.e., the brief war fought in 1991 between Iraq and United Nations allies to free Kuwait from occupying Iraqi forces:
—Note: Here, the phrase is war information fatigue—cf., below, quotation 4:

Most Americans—57 per cent in a reputable poll—want further restrictions on media reporting of the war. They do not, in fact, wish to be told what is happening.
Perhaps they are suffering from war information fatigue, like so many of us.

4-: From When it’s healthy to be hardhearted, by Minette Marrin, published in The Sunday Telegraph (London, England) of Sunday 5^th May 1991 [The Sunday Telegraph Review: page 2, column 1]:

Compassion fatigue isn’t new—I first heard the expression from the lips of Bob Geldof about five years ago—but it has grown, during the Gulf war, with the numbing emergence of information fatigue.

5-: From the Dorset Evening Echo (Weymouth, Dorset, England) of Thursday 19^th January 1995 [page 19, column 2]:

Business info is target
The business information small firms need must be more “targeted”.
That is the conclusion reached at a recent meeting between Sir Michael Butler, chairman of Dorset’s Business Link and John Parsons, chairman of the CBI smaller firms council.
Says Sir Michael: “Smaller firms are suffering from information fatigue. The last thing they want is more information.”

6-: From the Leicester Mercury (Leicester, Leicestershire, England) of Monday 5^th August 1996 [page 19, column 1]:

Fatigue seminar
INFORMATION fatigue and how to cope with it is the theme of a seminar being held in Leicester later this month.
The course is designed to help business people cope with information saturation so they can turn an overload into a meaningful system.
Delegates will be taught the rudiments of information management.

7-: From The Morris File, by Albert Morris, published in The Scotsman (Edinburgh, Midlothian, Scotland) of Saturday 19^th October 1996 [page 17, column 6]:

Never in the history of the human race have people been subject to such a daily and unwavering barrage of information. The media, augmented by the global network of the Internet, produce a continual presentation of facts and opinions. The result is that the public are slowly being swamped in an ever-increasing Niagara downpour of what used to be called intelligence.
The novelist Aldous Huxley wrote that if a little knowledge was dangerous, “where is the man who has so much as to be out of danger?” The melancholy fact of today’s information-awash world is that we are getting too much knowledge injected into us and that many people are now suffering from information fatigue.