Information overload is nothing new

I am one of those worriers. I worry that we have too much cheap and easy access to information in too many forms, that the devices we carry with us in our pockets are designed to fracture our attention, and that in our age (which is, following Postman, fittingly called an age of distraction) thinking is made increasingly difficult.

Samuel Johnson made a distinction between hard study, perusal, curious reading, and mere reading. When one is in the mode of hard study, a pencil must be to hand for making notes; curious reading is more like consulting; curious reading is something like reading a good novel; mere reading is browsing.

In his ‘Of Studies,’ Francis Bacon tells us that:

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.

“As our mental lives become more fragmented,” Matthew B. Crawford writes in The World Beyond Your Head, “what is at stake often seems to be nothing less than the question of whether one can maintain a coherent self.”

The argument goes something like this: Every time a new technology emerges, public intellectuals warn that it will make deep thinking impossible. But, they’ve been wrong every time. So, these warnings about these technologies are wrong, too.

“The consensus about the dangers of new technologies is almost as widespread as their adoption.”