The First Information Age: the 16th Century

Once again, the naivete of the (post)modern world has been demonstrated, and not surprisingly by Neil Postman. In his enjoyably impressive Technopoly, he writes about the overload of information that the modern book (not computer) created. In so doing, he reminds me that the "crises" of our day do not necessarily warrant the fear or euphoria we are so prone to give them, not unlike the toddler whose scraped knee does not necessarily call for mom or dad to drop everything and call 911 but rather, to give a kind word, a good dusting off, a gentle kiss or hug, and "See? All better, now back to having fun!" In many respects, the internet, with it's ability to exponentially grow information, warrants no more euphoria nor denunciations than the printing press received in its day, growing as it did (exponentially) the amount of information available to people. Here's Postman's analogy (pp. 61-62):

Nothing could be more misleading than the claim that computer technology introduced the age of information. The printing press began that age in the early sixteenth century. Forty years after Gutenberg converted an old wine press into a printing machine with movable type, there were presses in 110 cities in six different countries. Fifty years after the press was invented, more than eight million books had been printed, almost all of them filled with information that had previously been unavailable to the average person. There were books on law, agriculture, politics, exploration, metallurgy, botany, linguistics, pediatrics, and even good manners. There were also assorted guides and manuals; the world of commerce rapidly became a world of printed paper through the widespread use of contracts, deeds, promissory notes, and maps.

So much new information, of so many diverse types, was generated that printers could no longer use the scribal manuscript as their model of a book. By the mid-sixteenth century, printers began to experiment with new formats, among the most important innovations being the use of Arabic numerals to number pages. Pagination led inevitably to more accurate indexing, annotation, and cross-referencing, which in turn was accompanied by innovations in punctuation marks, section heads, paragraphing, title-paging, and running heads. By the end of the sixteenth century, the machine-made book had a typographic form and a look comparable to books of today.

All of this is worth mentioning because innovations in the format of the machine-made book were an attempt to control the flow of information, to organize it by establishing priorities and by giving it sequence. Very early on, it was understood that the printed book had created an information crisis...

What I find illuminating, from my (post)modern perspective, is that what I (and so many) have thought was an "information overload" problem unique to our age by virtue of the specific electronic technologies we have created is actually not the first time in history such a problem has been created and faced. Once again, we are not quite so unique in history as we might otherwise be tempted to think; it remains to be seen what alterations to the Internet (or any other information medium) might be made to manage the volume (even accuracy) of information that we create.

BHT