ABSTRACT
The growing volume of data that is generated globally every day is not only shared, but much of it is accessible. ‘Attention economics’ is an approach to the management of information that treats human attention as a scarce commodity and applies economic theory to solve various information management problems. The extreme conditions of dealing with big data sets are apparently causing ‘infobesity’, ‘device addiction’ and ‘analysis paralysis’. The paradox of big data and information overload is that one would assume that the more data that is available, the better informed a decision will be. The volume of data available to examine in legal disputes tests the historical rationale of discovery. An irony of ‘too much data’ is that an entire layer of data may mask the information that sits inside the data. The problem with excessive data and big data’s failure to identify causal links between inputs and outcomes is why Google Flu Trends stopped predicting who will get sick.
