the so-called principle of least effort is sometime referred to as the law of least effort or Zipt's law. It originally appeared in book by George Zipf (1902-1950) of Harvard University, whose area of expertise was philology what today we would call linguistics. The book, published in 1949, was entitled Human behavior and the princi-ple of least effort : An introduction to human ecology. Zipf initially developed the PLE through statistical analysis of word occurrence in developments, and by analyzing other artifacts of human activity, such as the census and other government record. Zipf intended to develop a broad explanation for human activity.
The PLE's premise is that , in performing tasks (e.g., writing or speak-ing) individuals adopt a course ofaction that will expend the probable least average of their work the least effort. Many proposition s can be derived from the basic premise. One example (anong several dozen offered by Pool, 1985) is this : "Information channel use is a function of user awareness." A number of empirical studies have found that, as knowledge of a source, its potential contents and capabilities increases, the use of that they have used in the past in strong preference to trying out new sources of information