Neuron Global Works to Solve Age Old Problem of Information Overload
As we acknowledge and bewail the consequences of information overload for knowledge workers in recent decades, it is hard not to conclude that the deluge of data is unique to the 21st century.
But is it? Could it all have happened before, when the world was smaller and less connected?
In an article in the 26 June 2007 issue of the online Canadian law journal Slaw, Ted Tjaden cites a study in the Journal of the History of Ideas pointing out that ever since the introduction of Gutenberg’s printing press in the mid-15th century—and even as early as the 13th century—people have been complaining about information overload. In 1685 French scholar Adrien Baillet lamented that “We have reason to fear that the multitude of books which grows every day in a prodigious fashion will make the following centuries fall into a state as barbarous as that of the centuries that followed the fall of the Roman Empire.”
“Information overload happens whenever people are overwhelmed by data because they can’t sort, cull, and organize it,” observes Sedarius Tekara Perrotta, president of Neuron Global. “The printing revolution must have been as daunting in Gutenberg’s time as the information glut is today. Everyone needs strategies for organizing data.”
Tjaden describes the measures that those 15th-century and later scholars took to cope with their information overload and design the layout of information:
- navigational tools such as the incipit (“it begins” in Latin) mark to indicate the start of textual passages. We take for granted today the use of tables of contents, page numbering, alphabetical indices, and so on, but these were techniques that were developed over time based on the need to better organize printed texts.
- the commonplace book (a sort of diary of miscellaneous quotations organized by topic or theme), which perhaps served the same purpose as the blog or wiki.
- encyclopedias. The notion in 1728 that Chambers’ Cyclopedia could capture the entire body of knowledge seems quaint today
- taxonomies. The number of plants being identified by botanists increased hugely during the Renaissance, requiring new taxonomies to classify the large amount of information. The role and importance of taxonomies is of course very familiar to the modern day knowledge manager.
- maps. The map concept is also a nice metaphor for the idea of visually capturing on a single page a much larger body of information.
- marginalia: A scholar adding marginal notes to the Gutenberg Bible to make their comments available to subsequent users sounds scandalous , not to say sacrilegious, today.
