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Before print, scripture was not truly fixed. All forms of knowledge achieved stability and permanence, not because paper was more durable than papyrus but simply because there were many copies.
“Overloading of circuits” was a fairly new metaphor to express a sensation—too much information—that felt new.
After “information theory” came to be, so did “information overload,” “information glut,” “information anxiety,” and “information fatigue,” the last recognized by the OED in 2009 as a timely syndrome: “Apathy, indifference, or mental exhaustion arising from exposure to too much information, esp. (in later use) stress induced by the attempt to assimilate excessive amounts of information from the media, the Internet, or at work.”
David Foster Wallace had a more ominous name for this modern condition: Total Noise. “The tsunami of available fact, context, and perspective”—that, he wrote in 2007, constitutes Total Noise. He talked about the sensation of drowning and also of a loss of autonomy, of personal responsibility for being informed. To keep up with all the information we need proxies and subcontractors.
Another way to speak of the anxiety is in terms of the gap between information and knowledge. A barrage of data so often fai...
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“Unfortunately, ‘information retrieving,’ however swift, is no substitute for discovering by direct personal inspection knowledge whose very existence one had possibly never been aware of, and following it at one’s own pace through the further ramification of relevant literature.” He begged for a return to “moral self-discipline.” There is a whiff of nostalgia in this sort of warning, along with an undeniable truth: that in the pursuit of knowledge, slower can be better. Exploring the crowded stacks of musty libraries has its own rewards. Reading—even browsing—an old book can yield sustenance
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Streufert concluded from the data that “superoptimal” information loads caused poor performance,
Most felt that a surfeit of information tainted their leisure time as well as their work time. Some reported headaches. The tentative conclusion: information overload is real;
Forgetting used to be a failing, a waste, a sign of senility. Now it takes effort. It may be as important as remembering.
What do you do when you have everything at last? Daniel Dennett imagined—in 1990, just before the Internet made this dream possible—that electronic networks could upend the economics of publishing poetry.
For a certain time, collectors, scholars, or fans possessed their books and their records. There was a line between what they had and what they did not. For some, the music they owned (or the books, or the videos) became part of who they were. That line fades away. Most of Sophocles’ plays are lost, but those that survive are available at the touch of a button. Most of Bach’s music was unknown to Beethoven; we have it all—partitas, cantatas, and ringtones. It comes to us instantly, or at light speed. It is a symptom of omniscience. It is what the critic Alex Ross calls the Infinite Playlist,
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When Dennett imagined his Complete Poetry Network, he saw the problem. “The obvious counterhypothesis arises from population memetics,” he said. “If such a network were established, no poetry lover would be willing to wade through thousands of electronic files filled with doggerel, looking for good poems.” Filters would be needed—editors and critics. “They flourish because of the short supply and limited capacity of minds, whatever the transmission media between minds.” When information is cheap, attention becomes expensive. For
When information is cheap, attention becomes expensive.
Once a piece of information is filed, it is statistically unlikely ever to be seen again by human eyes.
“The perception of an overabundance of books fueled the production of many more books.”
Ask bloggers and tweeters: Which is worse, too many mouths or too many ears?
Once again, as in the first days of the telegraph, we speak of the annihilation of space and time. For McLuhan this was prerequisite to the creation of global consciousness—global knowing. “Today,” he wrote, “we have extended our central nervous systems in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned. Rapidly, we approach the final phase of the extensions of man—the technological simulation of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society.”
bunkum (“nonsense, tricked out with a variety of tedious metaphysical conceits,” judged Peter Medawar),
Shannon had to be blunt. He simply declared meaning to be “irrelevant to the engineering problem.” Forget human psychology; abandon subjectivity.
A paradox is at work here: ours is a world about which we pretend to have more and more information but which seems to us increasingly devoid of meaning.
there is no perfect language.
communication is something human beings like to do.
A search for the phrase truth universally acknowledged and the name Darcy produced four thousand matches.
This is why cyberspace can feel not just crowded but lonely. You can drop a stone into a well and never hear a splash.
like being in a city
What good is complete knowledge, in its immobile perfection? Borges worries: “The certitude that everything has been written negates us or turns us into phantoms.” To which, John Donne had replied long before, “He that desires to print a book, should much more desire, to be a book.”
The library will endure; it is the universe. As for us, everything has not been written; we are not turning into phantoms. We walk the corridors, searching the shelves and rearranging them, looking for lines of meaning amid leagues of cacophony and incoherence, reading the history of the past and of the future, collecting our thoughts and collecting the thoughts of others, and every so often glimpsing mirrors, in which we may recognize creatures of the information.
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