Towards a research on information pollution

Information revolution may incur information pollution, noting that industrial revolution incurred environmental pollution. By information pollution we mean the presence and spread of undesirable messages in the human society, in quantities large enough to produce significantly adverse effects on human activities and social life. Information theory is mainly concerned with probabilistic uncertainty of messages, whereas information pollution research pays attention to values of messages: a message can be essential, useful, useless, harmful, or even poisonous. In this paper we discuss the information pollution phenomenon, and present statistics of information pollution (e-mail collected on Internet). We propose a quantitative index to measure information pollution and highlight various potential approaches to modeling the information pollution behavior.