Yoram Kalman - IORG Member bio page

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Yoram Kalman

Researcher, Department of Management and Economics, the Open University of Israel

Web site: http://www.kalmans.com

In a nutshell: I research computer mediated communication, and specifically silence in online communication. I have found that often people are unresponsive to emails and other online methods of communication because of issues related to information overload.

More detail: My interest in information overload is both academic and professional.

Academically, I research online communication, and my PhD research focused on online silence: its causes and consequences. Online silence and information overload are often linked to each other. Often, people do not get to respond to emails and other messages since they are constantly swamped by incoming messages, and are unable to cope with the overload. This creates anxiety both to the sender who is experiencing silence, as well as to the recipient who wants to be responsive, but is unable to do so.

Professionally, in my most recent industry position as Senior Vice President for Academic at the Amsterdam-based Laureate Online Education, I was responsible for serving close to 2000 online students world-wide, and for leading over one hundred online instructors from around the world. This meant that I and my employees were daily in touch with hundreds of students and staff worldwide. Dealing with the constant overload of electronic messaging was a significant professional challenge. I believe we found good solutions, and were able to communicate very effectively, and provide our students and staff with a positive experience, despite the challenges. I am very interested in sharing this knowledge and experience, in order to improve communication between groups of geographically distributed individuals.

Personally, I believe that information overload is here to stay. I think it is often our *choice* to be overloaded, since we always want to be "on top of things". I think that once we acknowledge that being overloaded is a choice we make, we can then take a look and see how we can prevent this communication load from making us less effective or from causing us to be miserable. As a personal example, for me it is impossible not to go online during evenings and weekends. Acknowledging that it is inevitable, I am able to balance that burden by usually working from home, as well as by sometimes taking an hour or two during "office hours" to do something for the body or for the soul.

You are invited to learn more about me and my work on my academic homepage at www.kalmans.com.