I was 9 years old and only a couple of months removed from the Deep South when I walked into my first real library. Until then, I had no idea so many books had been written. Big-eyed, I walked slowly past one row of shelves after another, past the fairytales and adventure stories “for boys,” past the books on cars and trains and planes, and into the forbidden adults-only section, which, in those days, did not mean pornography, merely books considered too difficult or uninteresting for juvenile readers.
Maybe it was that day, maybe a few days later, when I came to the horrible realization that I would never be able to read all those books. Unhappy epiphany.
Not long afterward, I discovered that what I had perceived as the world’s repository of all human learning in that tiny Nebraska library of 4000 or so volumes barely skimmed the surface. Millions of books were waiting to be read.
I was reminded of this a week ago when I visited a university library to check out the collection on Frederick Douglass (my all-time No. 1 hero, whose visage would be a superb alternative to, say, Ulysses S. Grant on the $50 bill). As I wandered into the appropriate section and looked into the stacks, I thought, if I’m really, really lucky, by the time my spirit heads out into the Great Cosmos, I’ll have read perhaps 10,000 of these books. Plus uncountable newspapers, surveys, journals, memoranda, white papers, investigations, letters, essays, and … blogs. If I have an addiction, it’s this. I’m a glutton for the written word.
My grandmother on my stepfather’s side, a tiny, tyrannical woman, saw eclectic reading as a luxury. Until the day she died, she told her grown, college-educated sons (and everybody else within earshot) that the only book anybody really needed to get along was the Bible. Everything else distracts you from getting knowledge, she said. (When she was well into her 90s, I caught her paging through a
People magazine, a rare lapse.)
I vigorously disagreed with my grandmother’s advice – though only once to her face. But she had a point. Information isn’t knowledge, certainly isn’t wisdom, and sometimes, perhaps much of the time, we distract ourselves from wisdom and knowledge by trying to over-consume “information.” We’re overwhelmed by details that often blur the big picture.
I admit that I’ve transferred an awful lot of the time I previously dedicated to reading and discussing books to reading on the Internet, including too much time cruising that most ephemeral (yet permanent) source of information, the comment section of web logs. Reading now devours a third of my waking hours - 40 hours a week - a full-time job. I rationalize this sedentary behavior and the enhanced waist line thereby created as “keeping up.” Yet I always feel that I’m falling behind.
Perhaps I speak only for myself. If so, I apologize for wasting your time when you could have been … reading something else. But I think I’m definitely not alone. Case in point:
Information overload keeps expanding
By Robert S. Boyd
Feel overwhelmed by the deluge of information flooding the world today? No wonder. Researchers say that the amount of new words, sounds, pictures and numbers produced and stored on paper, film or computer disks has almost doubled in three years.
The supply of new material saved in a single year, 2002, would fill half a million libraries the size of the Library of Congress - the world's largest collection of books and papers - if it were all converted to print, according to a study by Peter Lyman and Hal Varian, political scientists at the University of California, Berkeley.
"Our intent was to quantify people's feeling of being overwhelmed by information and to look at trends," Lyman said in a telephone interview. "People had no sense of why this was happening or where the growth was." …
The information glut may be making it harder to find useful, dependable material in the tidal wave of material bombarding people's senses, Lyman fears. …
"What I want to study next is how do people make sense of all this," Lyman said. "I still keep photos in an old shoebox, but I realize that this is not a good model."
"We need more research on how to manage information effectively," Varian added in an e-mail. "We should teach information management in schools." …
Lyman has other concerns, too, about information privacy and misuse of personal information gathered. But that’s entirely another topic.
What I’d like to know is how much time other people spend in non-work-related reading, and how you manage the flow of information. Do you feel overwhelmed or have you figured out a way to control your intake and make sense of it all?
Take the Poll: