Communication in a Cognitively Overloaded Environment, A Case Study of Newsletters in a Global Company

Abstract: To use newsletters as a corporate communication mean is easy: once penned they are quickly distributed to an arbitrarily large group of recipients with the main purpose to inform. On the basis of a case study with a global IT company the question is answered whether newsletters could be used as a communication channel and convey management's message organisational issues, to the employees in an information overloaded environment. Combining the findings of the field of informatics with cognition science, new insights were gained including a new 3-Stage-Model that describes the connection between cognitive- and information overload and how they can lead to blocking certain communication channels. For example, final conclusions of this investigation were that newsletters were not able to penetrate the data smog surrounding today's employees and that other communication channels are thus suited better for information distribution purposes. This investigation can be seen as a contribution to information management within the field of informatics as we investigated a new use of newsletters as communication mean and introduce a new model 3-Stage-Model for information- and cognitive overload.