Information Overload?

Every so often I’ll hear some­one men­tion in pass­ing that we are over­loaded with infor­ma­tion com­pared to our ances­tors. I’m sure that’s true if you mea­sure “infor­ma­tion” in a very spe­cif­ic way, but I’m not sure it’s as true as peo­ple think it is.

Augus­tine, the 4th cen­tu­ry bish­op, left behind over 5,000,000 words in writ­ing.

That’s 5 mil­lion words.

Many nov­els have 50,000 (the range varies depend­ing on the genre).

He left behind the equiv­a­lent of 100 nov­els. And he’s just one author.

For the edu­cat­ed elite, the ancient world was rife with infor­ma­tion. And, by and large, the stuff they read was more impor­tant than the “infor­ma­tion” we’re so proud of. Most of what we devote our brain­pow­er to pro­cess­ing is from news­pa­pers, mag­a­zines, and tele­vi­sion… the knowl­edge equiv­a­lent of emp­ty calo­ries.

For all the “infor­ma­tion” we each have at our beck and call, not many of us could muster up 5 mil­lion words.

And since our point in say­ing that we’re so over­loaded com­pared to the ancients is that we’ve got so much more stuff to process than they did, maybe we should­n’t be so smug. After all — we don’t real­ly process the “infor­ma­tion” that bom­bards us. We rush through it and prompt­ly for­get as much as pos­si­ble to get ready for the next del­uge.

The ancients were read­ing and reread­ing and rereread­ing sub­stan­tive works and actu­al­ly under­stand­ing them. And so Augus­tine was able to write 5,000,000 words that peo­ple still mull over today.

We have no idea what infor­ma­tion over­load feels like. If we can­celed our news­pa­per sub­scrip­tions, threw away all our mag­a­zines, and replaced all that read­ing time with reread­ing a hand­ful of sol­id books until we under­stood them thor­ough­ly, then we’d have some inkling of what true infor­ma­tion over­load is.

And since we’ve got so many years of insights beyond Augus­tine to avail our­selves of, and the mod­ern peer-reviewed sys­tem of jour­nals to draw from, we’d be very jus­ti­fied in say­ing that we wres­tle with infor­ma­tion in a way that the ancients nev­er did.

But not now.