Another thumb-sucker about how we’re been overwhelmed with data and it’s all Google’s fault (well, not really):
Today, any young reader of JK Rowling’s The Philosopher’s Stone would be bound to ask, turning the pages with bated-breath expectation as Harry Potter comes close to being discovered in the out-of-bounds section of the library: “Why didn’t he just Google it?”
As so often, however, our sense of living in an age which is particularly vulnerable to being overwhelmed by too much information turns out to be misplaced.
Even before the invention of the printing press — when the distribution of information depended upon teams of scribes working with pen and ink in monastery libraries — the fear of too much to know, too much material too widely and swiftly disseminated, was already threatening to overwhelm our orderly sense of understanding.
Once books proliferated in printed form from the 16th Century onwards — “too many books, too little time” was the complaint of scholars like Erasmus and Descartes. Knowledge-gatherers scrambled to develop ever more-complicated ways of assembling, organising and distributing knowledge drawn from as wide as possible a range of erudite and unfamiliar sources for easy retrieval.
[. . .]
Of course I am labouring the point here to remind us that there has never been a time when mastering the sum of human knowledge has not been felt to be an impossible task. And historically there was the additional fear that the precious store of knowledge accumulating as the world grew in wisdom might be lost by natural or man-made disaster. Early modern compilers of information feared that without care for its safekeeping, information might run through their fingers like sand, lost forever.
A strong theme in the surprisingly large early modern literature bewailing the effect of too many books is not just worry at not being able to keep hold of everything a person is required to know, but this fear of loss. To 15th and 16th Century scholars, the period following antiquity — the so-called “dark ages” — had almost succeeded in obliterating classical learning forever. In the 17th Century, Europe-wide wars, civil wars and unrest had resulted in the destruction of entire archives of precious administrative documents.
Hence the potent theme of knowledge rescued from near-oblivion, which runs through early modern discussions of how to store and retrieve information reliably.
