Just found this while looking for something else. Seems relevant to now:
Monday, March 11, 2019
Today and in the 1400's
I was trying out the app called "Libby" on my iPad. It is interesting and fun since Libby lets me see what is available for download from the network of libraries in my area. Twice now, I have borrowed a book electronically but soon decided I wanted my own copy in my Kindle collection of books.
The first book I did that with was "When Breath Becomes Air", excellently written by a young physician nearly finished with his long arduous training and ready to have a great career, only to come down with cancer. That book I am reading aloud to Lynn. The second ebook I borrowed but wound up buying is "The Organized Mind." Dr. Daniel J. Levitin has been helpful and insightful and clear in several books. From the title, I thought this was going to be about alphabetizing my to-do lists but it is deeper and more relevant than that. (Since I "knew" the author, I only just noticed that I have been crediting the wrong man. Levitin is correct.)
The first part that really got my attention was this:
Thirty years ago, travel agents made our airline and rail reservations, sales clerks helped us find what we were looking for in stores, and professional typists or secretaries helped busy people with their correspondence. Now we do most of those things ourselves. The information age has off-loaded a great deal of the work previously done by people we could call information specialists onto all of the rest of us.
Levitin, Daniel J.. The Organized Mind . Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
From school kids to elders, many people I meet complain about information overload. One worry is that despite having too much to read and pay attention to, I might be missing something important. Just the very evening that I read the above, a friend mentioned a psychotherapist using an online calendar where patients schedule their own appointments. Seems like it might be more convenient and a better way and yet, it is another thing I have to take care of, and do correctly myself.
Despite the gush of info, ads, games, movies, videos and such, we are not the first to feel swamped:
Yet again, many complained that intellectual life as we knew it was done for. Erasmus, in 1525, went on a tirade against the "swarms of new books." He blamed printers whose profit motive sought to fill the world with books that were "foolish, ignorant, malignant, libelous, mad, impious and subversive." Leibniz complained about "that horrible mass of books that keeps on growing" and that would ultimately end in nothing less than a "return to barbarism." Descartes famously recommended ignoring the accumulated stock of texts and instead relying on one's own observations: "even if all knowledge could be found in books, where it is mixed in with so many useless things and confusingly heaped in such large volumes..."
Levitin, Daniel J.. The Organized Mind (pp. 14-15). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
It was that new-fangled thing called the "printing press" (about the year 1440) that changed the knowledge-sphere.
