I enjoy being overwhelmed by large numbers – especially about information.  Knowing that last year the world’s information base is estimated to have doubled every eleven hours doesn’t keep me awake.  I get relaxed by reading that 300 billion emails 200 million tweets ” and 2.5 billion text messages course through our digital networks every day.  I know it bothers some of my friends – but mostly those who wonder how they are going to keep up with all of it. Who are they kidding?  The glut of information is not only unprecedented but completely out of control. Links have replaced learning and we are all headed toward the abyss of unthinking.
Well” maybe not on both counts. In the latest issue of The Hedgehog Review Chad Wellmon writes a helpful reflection titled “Why Google Isn’t Making Us Stupid…or Smart” that offers another perspective that gives me even more reasons to relax.  It turns out that our information age is not unprecedented but there have been numerous information explosions in history that have all created the same concerns – and similar solutions.  “Complaints about too many books gained particular urgency over the course of the eighteenth century when the book market exploded especially in England France and Germany. Whereas today we imagine ourselves to be engulfed by a flood of digital data late eighteenth-century German readers for example imagined themselves to have been infested by a plague of books [Bücherseuche]. Books circulated like contagions through the reading public. These anxieties corresponded to a rapid increase in new print titles in the last third of the eighteenth century an increase of about 150 percent from 1770 to 1800 alone.”  In factthere was widespread concern that book publishing was a kind of “epidemic disease” and whereas before only the learned had published this new technology had made is so that now “almost the very Coblers and Women who can scarce read are ambitious to appear in print and then we may see them carrying their books from door to door as a Hawker does his comb cases ” pins and laces.”  Philosopher Immanuel Kant complained that “such an overabundance of books encouraged people to “read a lot” and “superficially”.
How did they handle such a proliferation of publications and flood of new (and mostly useless) knowledge?  Not surprisingly” they developed tools to deal with information overload that are not dissimilar to ours today.  They created ways to compile edit condense and organize information that were genuine innovations.  A whole industry of scholars writing reviews and condensations was born.  Encyclopedias were created to capture as much as possible about a wide range of subjects.  Journals reduced entire books to a paragraph to enable people to get the essence of something quickly.  People adapted to the change and even better new institutions ” disciplines and businesses were birthed as a result.
So” I’m back to being overwhelmed is not a bad thing.  It’s not new or unique to our generation and watching the way we will adapt to it is exciting.  That’s what keeps me awake at night.