Fear of Information Overload Is Not New

It's actually really old:

We might feel overwhelmed, occasionally or often, by all the stuff that is out there -- by the trove of global knowledge so vast that it would seem to defy comprehensibility, let alone comprehension. In all that, however, we are in good company with humans of prior generations. As early as 1550, the Italian writer Anton Francesco Doni was complaining that there were "so many books that we do not even have time to read the titles." The 17th century's Comenius referred to granditas librorum -- the "vast quantity of books" -- and Basnage to the "flood." Gesner, writing not too long after the printing press was invented, bemoaned the "confused and irritating multitude of books."

In 1821, Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote the essay In Defence of Poetry, in which he famously declared that poets are the "unacknowledged legislators" of the world. He began it thusly: "We have more moral, political, and historical wisdom than we know how to reduce into practice; we have more scientific and economical knowledge than can be accommodated to the just distribution of the produce which it multiplies." Information overload, or rather the fear of it, is not a new phenomenon.

We have for centuries been concerned about the insurmountable volume of information in the world. Being only able to digest a fraction of the world's texts in a single lifetime is not a new dilemma. In the early days of the internet (I mean the late nineties, when newspapers were still publishing their daily editions between two and three in the morning) it really might have been possible for one person to read everything. Now of course the rate of information production and distribution has been augmented dramatically. Any such ambition would be laughable; just as laughable as the idea that one person could read every book in the world in the nineteenth century. We live in times overloaded with information, yes — but this feeling we have of too much information? It's not peculiar to our time.