Information overload - not a new phenomenon!

Yesterday I published an article about what was called Information Deprivation Disorder, which attracted a certain amount of negative comment from readers. I note that the problem of information overload, and subsequent withdrawal symptoms, isn't new. Boston.com reports:

Worry about information overload has become one of the drumbeats of our time. The world’s books are being digitized, online magazines and newspapers and academic papers are steadily augmented by an endless stream of blog posts and Twitter feeds; and the gadgets to keep us participating in the digital deluge are more numerous and sophisticated. The total amount of information created on the world’s electronic devices is expected to surpass the zettabyte mark this year (a barely conceivable 1 with 21 zeroes after it).

. . .

Beneath all this concern lies the sense that humanity is experiencing an unprecedented change — that modern technology is creating a problem that our culture and even our brains are ill equipped to handle. We stand on the brink of a future that no one can ever have experienced before.

But is it really so novel? Human history is a long process of accumulating information, especially once writing made it possible to record texts and preserve them beyond the capacity of our memories. And if we look closely, we can find a striking parallel to our own time: what Western Europe experienced in the wake of Gutenberg’s invention of printing in the 15th century, when thousands upon thousands of books began flooding the market, generating millions of copies for sale. The literate classes experienced exactly the kind of overload we feel today — suddenly, there were far more books than any single person could master, and no end in sight. Scholars, at first delighted with the new access to information, began to despair. “Is there anywhere on earth exempt from these swarms of new books?” asked Erasmus, the great humanist of the early 16th century.

But amid the concern, that crisis began to generate something else: a raft of innovative new methods for dealing with the accumulation of information. These included early plans for public libraries, the first universal bibliographies that tried to list all books ever written, the first advice books on how to take notes, and encyclopedic compilations larger and more broadly diffused than ever before. Detailed outlines and alphabetical indexes let readers consult books without reading them through, and the makers of large books experimented with slips of paper for cutting and pasting information from manuscripts and printed matter — a technique that, centuries later, would become essential to modern word processing.

. . .

The early modern experience of overload was different in many ways from today’s. For example, then only an educated elite and a few areas of life were affected. Today people in nearly every walk of life, at least in the developed world, rely on the Internet for much of their basic information.

What we share with our ancestors, though, is the sense of excess. Most Internet searches will turn up vastly more results than can be used. Too much of the bad stuff, not enough of the good, has been the subtext of complaints about overload from the beginning. But like the early modern compilers, we too are devising ways to cope. In many ways, our key methods of coping with overload haven’t changed since the 16th century: We still need to select, summarize, and sort, and ultimately need human judgment and attention to guide the process.

There's more at the link. The article provides a lot of detail about how Renaissance scholars developed new tools and techniques to handle the flood of information, including useful inventions like the 'florilegium'. Interesting and recommended reading.

Peter