Information overload existed for millennia says historian

Story from To the Best of Our Knowledge. Listen to audio above for full interview.

“The theme of there being too much to know, too many books to read, goes really way back,” according to historian Ann Blair. The sheer number of text available over the internet is enough to overwhelm many people, but the problem of information overload has been around for millennia.

Blair looks to two Roman scholars to show the two ancient views of what to do with so much information. Seneca, who was born in 4 BC, believed that too many books was a distraction. Blair says that he believed that people should choose a few books and know them well.

The Roman scholar Pliny, on the other hand, once said, “There is no book so bad that some good cannot be gotten from it.” According to Blair, he was read to while reading and while in the bath. She told To The Best of Our Knowledge, “never a moment to waste is certainly a long running concern of scholars.”

One way that early scholars tried to deal with information overload was by note taking. “I think it’s one of the first tools of information management,” Blair says. Some in the Renaissance had young boys, mostly, copy out long texts multiple times. “The copying in itself was a way of slowing the mind,” according to Blair, so that people could take in the information more effectively.

“The idea was that you would accumulate notes throughout your reading,” Blair says, and that would help you understand the world better. The problem, of course, is that after acquiring too many notes, people would have no way to organize them.

“A crucial role of for sorting information was played by printed books,” Blair emphasizes. They “offered you in print ready made, the kind of notes you wished you’d taken yourself but didn’t have time to.” This, according to Blair, is where the idea of the encyclopedia came from, long before the name “encyclopedia” came into usage.

People are often of two minds when it comes to information, according to Blair. “We have brought this on ourselves. We want all the information,” she says. On the other hand, once we have that information, “it doesn’t take much to overload the human brain.”

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