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Pre-Internet. Information overload hadn't been invented yet. We relished whatever rare information we could dig up on what interested us.
by taloft 14y ago
Pre-Internet. Information overload hadn't been invented yet. We relished whatever rare information we could dig up on what interested us.
- dalke 14y agoYou exaggerate. "Information overload" in the fully modern sense was invented before the first ARPANET node sent its first packet in 1969. For example, ISI was talking about "data scientists" and the "information explosion" back in the 1960s. Here's part of an ad from theirs in the 1966 "Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists" at http://books.google.com/books?id=WAgAAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA49&dq=%22information+overload%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=-7nEUJrhNabe4QTVkYAQ&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=%22information%20overload%22&f=false http://books.google.com/books?id=WAgAAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA49... "Despite the deluge of scientific and technical papers, only a small fraction falls within the area of each individual's specific interests. ... So your problem may not be one of information overload at all. You may actually have a shortage of information." (I'm reading through a collection of essays, written during the 1960s from the founder of the ISI. The complaints about there being too much information haven't changed in the last 40+ years.) BTW, the earliest Google Books hit I could find with that phrase comes from 1963: http://books.google.se/books?id=jPgqAAAAMAAJ&q=%22information+overload%22&dq=%22information+overload%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=ArzEUPeIIYOL4ATY3YHwDg&redir_esc=y http://books.google.se/books?id=jPgqAAAAMAAJ&q=%22inform... .