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Judy O'Connell

Information overload, the early years - The Boston Globe - 0 views

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shared by Judy O'Connell on 23 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • But what happened in the Renaissance was, like digital technology in our own time, transformative. It took overload to an entirely new order of magnitude.
  • 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.
  • Some of the most ingenious techniques for information management in early modern Europe were devised by the compilers who composed the largest reference books, like the “Theatrum humanae vitae” and its even larger sequel, the “Magnum theatrum” (“Great Theater,” 1631). Compilers cut and pasted, very literally, with scissors and glue, from manuscript notes they had already taken — or, even more efficiently, by exploiting a new, cheap source of printed information: older editions of books.
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  • 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
  • Some of our methods are similar, and others are completely new. Search engines like Google harness technology to do something that wasn’t possible earlier: using algorithms and data structures to respond to search queries that have never been posed before. Many of our tools will no doubt rapidly become obsolete, but a few of those may spawn useful offshoots, just as the note closet enabled the growth of sophisticated catalog systems.
  • Judy O'Connell on 23 Jan 11
     
    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).
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