On Information Overload

“These complaints about the consequences of printing were of course made in printed books, which added to the abundance of which they complained while offering various remedies to the overload: advice on how to read well, for example by taking good notes; judgments and reviews of books to aid in selecting them (a prime content of learned periodicals starting in the late seventeenth century); bibliographies to identify existing books (and possibly to deter the unnecessary composition of new ones); and reference works designed to collect the best parts of the best books to spare readers the trouble and expense of making these selections themselves. Printing prompted a new awareness of the need to manage information in and about books and also facilitated the development of new methods for doing so, among them printed questionnaires and lists, images and tables, cutting and pasting from printed books, or using the backs of printed playing cards.”

Ann Blair, “The Multitude of Books,” https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/multitude-books. The link provides an interesting excerpt from the edited collection Information: A Historical Companion. Reminds me of the advice we often give to students at the start of the semester soon to be overloaded with reading. The helpful guides in how to read a book take on new relevance, such as Mortimer Adler’s 1940 classic by that title. Or as is sometimes needed, Peter Barry’s guide for reading theoretical texts, Beginning Theory. It outlines the SQ3R approach to: survey; question; read; recall; and, review. These days I’ve been less interested in the initial rise of print, but rather the later impact when reading practices took root in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, e.g. Immanuel Kant’s essays on book piracy.