A topic I think about frequently is information – specifically, too much information. When I look at my Twitter, day after day, there are so many articles, so many relevant articles, they all seem important, facts and stories that I need to know to run my business efficiently. Does anybody feel that they have a good handle on what is going on in the world, day after day? If so, I have a feeling they are connected to the various social media outlets most of the day, and they have probably (or hopefully!) managed to find a way to get paid for doing so.
I still have a great deal of respect for people who read a lot, people who can recommend a book, and people that know some of the books I have read. To me, reading a book takes one through a journey. Some of you will be too young to remember, but once upon a time, if you wanted to find a book, for example, you went to this place called a library. And you searched in this ancient artifact — a thing called a card catalog. The card catalog gave you a number that was assigned to the book. And the books were all shelved in order in dusty old library stack.
I really do have fond memories of those days, and not just because library stacks could be good places to procrastinate instead of studying. Library stacks were places were serendipitous discoveries happened. Sometimes, when you got the catalog number and went to where the book was supposed to be, it wasn’t there. But even then, you could browse around for other things that you wanted, since the books were all neatly arranged in a nice tidy order, with similar books next to each other on the library shelf. I used to love whiling away the hours, browsing through library stacks like that. In college I used to get my best studying done tucked in a hidden corner of the library. I feel lucky that I went to college before computers completely took over. When I was in college I had a laptop, and most people did, but there was still a computer lab in the library, which was always full, and, although I don’t remember using or checking out any books in all of my 4 years, I still loved the atmosphere the library provided.
That’s not to say there weren’t downsides to the library and this search method, there were actually several of them. Suppose, for example, that you originally came looking for a book on, say, World War II, but decided that you really needed to browse through all the books about any war whatsoever, no matter when or where they happened. Suppose you wanted to know not just about the histories of the various wars, but about their role in reshaping subsequent philosophical thought. The old library catalog just didn’t have category for, “Everything having anything to do with war throughout history.” There was no easy way to find books about war in general, their histories, and their different impacts, each war had its own collection. Plus, even if you did manage, through a lot of catalog searching, to generate a list of all the different books about all the different wars, and their cultural and philosophical implications, you’d have to spend hours physically tracking down the books, section by section, because they would probably be spread out all over the library if not all over the county.
Wouldn’t it be infinitely better if the library could instantly re-categorize and re-shelve the books to suit your needs as a would-be browser? That’s precisely what an online, searchable database does really well. In the digital age, we can have multiple, simultaneous, ever-shifting categories, made up on the fly. Once all books, newspapers, magazines, print of any kind, go fully digital, we won’t have to worry about how books are arranged on an actual physical shelf. We’ll be able to rearrange the books on the virtual shelf in an instant, to anyone’s liking.
That sounds really cool, especially to the lover of all things technological and new in me. However, I have to admit that part of me still finds something at least a little bit satisfying about the old ways. Those old fixed categories and well-ordered shelves weren’t there just because of the limits of the old technology. They represented somebody’s best estimation of the proper divisions of human knowledge. They carried some weight because they were backed by the authority of an intellectual tradition. In the brave new user driven rather than authority driven digital world, where seemingly anything goes, where categories are made up on the fly, where the virtual shelf can be rearranged at the whim of the user, what separates the good from the bad, the wheat from the chaff, the silly from the serious?
One could easily worry that in this brave new user driven digital age we are just at sea on a chaotic ocean of information. The user may have too much power, backed by too little authority. I know I am frequently overwhelmed by all the messages coming in from all my various email addresses, facebook page, linkedin, twitter, etc.. If it has been a busy week, I find myself deleting most and hoping I didn’t miss anything super interesting or super important!! Besides that, I will still turn off my computer at night to give myself time to read…..gasp!! a new book!!
-GB