Friday 7 October 2011

Information overload: Victorian style

I found a good article recently by Terry Friedman. He writes about compiling a list of the worst 100 blogs, as a service to people to save them trawling through the mountains of crap that's out there. In doing so he provides a quote from Oscar Wilde, written in 1886.

Wilde was talking about compiling a list of the worst 100 books to give to university students, and in doing so he provides a remarkably prescient description of what we call 'information overload':

oscar wildeIndeed, it [the list] is one that is eminently needed in this age of ours, an age that reads so much that it has no time to admire, and writes so much that it has no time to think. Whoever will select out of the chaos of our modern curricula ‘The Worst Hundred Books’, and publish a list of them, will confer on the rising generation a real and lasting benefit.



The bit in bold could apply to blogs, and the 'noise' that we get from the internet. Information overload Victorian style! Some things never change.