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Robert Musil (1880-1942)
The Man Without Qualities
(written 1921-1942;
published mid-1950s)
Austrian Old Imperial Library
“We marched down the ranks in
that colossal storehouse of books,
and I don’t mind telling you I was
not particularly overwhelmed […].
Still, after a while I couldn't help
starting to do some figuring in my
head, and I got an unexpected
answer. […] I had been thinking that
if I read a book a day […] I could
claim a certain position in the world
of the intellect.”
“But what do you suppose that
librarian said to me as […] I asked
him how many books they had in
this crazy library?”
“Three and a half million,” he tells
me.
“It would take me ten thousand
years to carry out my plan.”
“I felt nailed to the spot – the whole
world seemed to be one enormous
practical joke!
And I'm telling you, even though
I'm feeling a bit calmer about it,
there's something radically wrong
somewhere!”
Plato (428-348 B.C.)
”If we depend on writing, we will lose the ability to remember anything”
Phaedrus, c. 370 B.C.
Ecclesiastes 12:12
“Of making many books there is no end.”
(4th or 3rd century B.C.)
Seneca (4-65 A.D.)
“distringit librorum multitudo”
(The abundance of books is a distraction.)
Barnaby Rich (1580-1613)
“[O]ne of the diseases of this age is the multiplicity of books; they doth so overcharge the world that tit is not able to digest the abundance of idle matter that is every day hatched and brought forth into the world.” (1613)
René Descartes (1596-1650) “Even if all knowledge could be found in books,
where it is mixed in with so many useless things and confusingly heaped in such large volumes, it would take longer to read those books than we have to live in this life and more effort to select the useful things than to find them oneself.”
Recherche de la vérité par la lumière naturelle, c. 1641
Denis Diderot (1713-1784) “As long as the centuries continue to unfold, the
number of books will grow continually, and one can predict that a time will come when it will be almost as difficult to learn anything from books as from the direct study of the whole universe. It will be almost as convenient to search for some bit of truth concealed in nature as it will be to find it hidden away in an immense multitude of bound volumes.” (L’Encyclpopédie, 1755)
How many books can we read?
U.S. Library of Congress = 34.5 million cataloged books and other print materials
Read 1 book / week from age 10 to 100
4680 books in a lifetime
Why did 16th- & 17th-century early adopters feel overwhelmed?
• Copernican Revolution
• Discovery of the New World
• Recovery of Ancient Texts
• Transformative technology: The Printing Press
• Correspondence networks
Théophraste Renaudot
(1585-1653)
DD
Conferences
(1633-1642)
“It has been found
good not only to
record on paper so
many fine thoughts
[…] but also to
print and publish
them […] with a
popularity known
to all.”
"If man is truly said to be a social
animal, his soul being the best part of
him, then his education can be
attained only by conference, which is
the commerce of souls.”
Théophraste Renaudot,
“De la Conférence” 1641
Gazette
(1631-1915)
"It is too bad that such a chronicle had not existed since the first king of France and that we don't have anything to tell us what happened back then during the 63 regencies that France has known. But man's memory is too clever to entrust it with all the wonders with which your Majesty will fill the north and all the continent. From now on one must assuage it with writings that fly, as in an instant, from the North to the South, that is to say, to all the ends of the Earth.” (1632)
Le Mercure Hollandois
1672-73
Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680)
Letters of
Kircher
Letters Written by Voltaire
Facebook (2012)
"By helping people form these connections, we
hope to rewire the way people spread and
consume information. We think the world’s
information infrastructure should resemble the
social graph — a network built from the bottom
up or peer-to-peer, rather than the monolithic,
top-down structure that has existed to date. We
also believe that giving people control over what
they share is a fundamental principle of this
rewiring." - Facebook IPO letter
From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg
• 17th century was a time of changes that lead to similar feelings
(overload, uselessness of information, fear of loss) and
innovations (mails, networks, conferences, blogs)
• Lots of similarities (including loss of privacy, empowerment of
minorities), even if 21st century innovations are different
(instantaneous, mainstream, global).
• Today we do not feel overwhelmed by books or paper letters.
Will our 21st century overload also go away?
Le Lever de Voltaire
by Jean Hubert (c. 1768-1772)
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