ABSTRACT
The instrumental models of information that follows to be similarly tended to exaggerate the message content, often to the near exclusion of the complex of social and cultural networks and exchanges in which transmitted information found both its meaning and its purpose. George Miller's notion of information input overload puts a new light on Festinger's idea of cognitive dissonance. The sociologist Orin Klapp has pointed out that apparently similar information environments produce dissonance and anxiety in one community while producing consonance and cohesion in another. According to Klapp, social networks characterized by high degrees of discursive feedback and low degrees of nondiscursive feedback typically experience more frequent and more severe problems of dissonance, both cognitive and conceptual. Herbert Simon has suggested that reality integration depends not only upon our balancing of formal channels and social networks, but also upon the role of goals and purposes.
