beyondwebct

Complaints about information overload, usually couched in terms of the overabundance of books, have a long history — reaching back to Ecclesiastes 12:12 (“of making books there is no end,” probably from the 4th or 3d century BC). The ancient moralist Seneca complained that “the abundance of books is distraction” in the 1st century AD, and there have been other info-booms from time to time — the building of the Library of Alexandria in the 3d century BC, or the development of newspapers starting in the 18th century.

around 1500, humanist scholars began to bemoan new problems: Printers in search of profit, they complained, rushed to print manuscripts without attention to the quality of the text, and the sheer mass of new books was distracting readers from the focus on the ancient authors most worthy of attention.

To confront this new challenge, printers, scholars, and compilers began to develop novel ways to manage all these texts — tools that listed, sorted under subject headings, summarized, and selected from all those books that no one person could master. Note-taking was one solution, which the humanist pedagogues advocated alongside their teaching of ancient rhetoric. But not everyone followed their advice to take notes from everything they read throughout their lives, and for those who didn’t, new kinds of reference books offered a ready-made version — collections of best bits that could be consulted using sophisticated indexes and tables of contents.

The larger printed books became, the more they needed to offer guidance through their own texts. The tables of contents and alphabetical indexes developed by printers and authors to accompany them are still recognizable today.

More effective to modern eyes, though not as widespread, were tables of contents that outlined layers of subdivisions with successive indentations, as a PowerPoint slide might today (but without the bullet points).

These slips were cut from a full page and soon glued onto a new sheet, but in the mid-17th century for the first time one scholar advocated using the slips themselves as an information-storage system.

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.

Early modern compilers were driven by this enthusiasm, even beyond their hopes for acquiring reputation or financial gain. Today, we see the same impulse in the proliferation of cooperative information sharing on the Internet, such as the many designers and programmers sharing new ways to visualize and efficiently use huge quantities of data. In democratizing our ability to contribute to a universal encyclopedia of experience and information, the Internet has shown just how widespread that long-running ambition remains today.

Overload has long been fueled by our own enthusiasm — the enthusiasm for accumulating and sharing knowledge and information, and also for experimenting with new forms of organizing and presenting it.