TMI Way Before the Internet

We are touted to be living in the Age of Information, thanks to the advent of widespread access to the Internet. Too Much Information, actually; the deluge is now considered a problem. Complaints abound of having to wade through the mounds of trash to find a sliver of gold. Fake news is everywhere and harder to distinguish from real news, whatever those mean. Oh, for the days of yore, when life was simpler.

Except it wasn’t.

That’s the thrust of Ann Blair’s Too Much to Know, subtitled Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age. Published in 2010 by Yale University Press, it is definitely an academic book, dense with information. It’s also very fascinating if you enjoy reading history chockful of detailed and thoughtful analysis. I’m not quite halfway through the book – it’s slow reading – but I’m enjoying it thoroughly!

In the book’s introduction, Blair writes: “We complain about overload in almost every field, from hardware-store stocking to library holdings to Internet searches. A Google search for ‘information overload’ itself generates more than 1.5 million hits, with the promise of solutions from office supply stores, management consultants, and stress relief services, among many others. But the perception of and complaints about overload are not unique to our period. Ancient, medieval, and early modern authors and authors working in non-Western contexts articulated similar concerns, notably about the overabundance of books and the frailty of human resources for mastering them (such as memory and time).”

The objects of Blair’s study are reference materials: reference works, bibliographies, encyclopedias and their forerunners, dictionaries, quotation lists, florilegia, and more. Writers in antiquity complained about information overload and the abundance of useless books. And this was before the printing press. The famous Seneca of Rome chided his “well-to-do contemporaries [wasting] time and money accumulating too many books. Instead Seneca recommended focusing on a limited number of good books to read thoroughly and repeatedly… This position exemplifies an effective and often dominant method of information management – to limit the quantity and nature of information to an established canon of works…”

But how do you choose that canon? How do you pick out the good from the bad? Even trashy works might contain some gleaming nugget of truth. How do we save the best for posterity? How do you determine relative importance? Well, someone has to read a bunch of material and then make selections. Maybe it was Cliff, making a study summary for himself. You might not even have to read the established canon. Just read Cliff’s Notes on those books and, thanks to Cliff, you’ve saved yourself lots of time!

According to Blair, “one of the great feats of information management in late antiquity was the composition of ten books of ecclesiastical history by Eusebius (260-339 CE), who worked with the support of a large staff to excerpt from the abundant holdings of the Library of Caesarea.” Copying was a laborious process in those times, and many old books have been lost over time; we only know of their existence through human compilers and early encyclopedists – before the word encyclopedia was invented. I loved reading encyclopedias as a child. I haven’t touched a physical copy in years now that I can just Google-It. But I was particularly pleased that on a family vacation last week, my ten-year old nephew regularly regaled us with relevant “Did you know…?” facts from his reading of encyclopedias. I’m glad kids these days still enjoy such an activity, and I learned some new facts while enjoying a relatively internet-free vacation.

Of the many reference genres that Blair discusses, I particularly enjoyed learning about florilegia. The term is derived from the Latin flores for flowers and legere for choosing/selecting. I like the term. It conveys the impression of carefully choosing flowers and assembling them into an artful arrangement. They were used in teaching during medieval times. Some reinforced the canon of the Middle Ages. (I learn from Blair that in descending order of citations, these are the Bible, church fathers, Ovid, Virgil, Horace, Cicero, Juvenal, Lucan, Seneca.) Other florilegia excerpted relatively unknown authors, keeping their work alive. And since really ‘old’ school meant being able to quote the pithy saying of an authority to bolster your argument, florilegia were likely the Cliffs Notes of an ancient generation.

If you follow my blog regularly, maybe it helps you with information management. While I did not consciously intend it to be a florilegium, I find that I do excerpt quotes from authors that I’ve read. Writing about the books I’ve found interesting and why also allows me to manage my own information intake. I’ve used my own blog to look up things I’d previously written about. And thanks to the Search function, ubiquitous in the age of the Internet, I don’t have to index my blog. I did start adding keywords about 6-12 months after originally starting my blog to help with the management. Perhaps one of my book reviews led you to reading a book in full that you found worthwhile. Maybe what I’m doing is not too different from the compilers in antiquity. I often learn about other books through blogs that I read.

A final note about Blair’s first chapter focusing on information management. What was the impact of printing? Blair argues that “general cultural consequences of printing are particularly hard to disentangle from those of multiple other [specific] cultural changes under way during precisely the same time.” She provides examples from both Western Europe and China, where the invention of printing (at different times) coincided with other concurrent discoveries and movements. Yes, books became much cheaper. Yes, errors that were introduced became more widespread. Yes, there were now a lot more trashy books and reading materials. But I learned from Blair that one huge new invention was the book cover and title! Previously, manuscripts did not have title pages. They were referred to typically by their opening words.

I like Blair’s discussion on this topic so I’ll quote her. “By contrast, a printed book needed to appeal to buyers who had no advance knowledge of the book, so the title page served as an advertisement, announcing title and author, printer, … and also additional boasts about useful features – ‘very copious indexes’… Title pages occasionally made deceptive claims, proclaiming novelty where there was little, or none.” Who would have thought that the invention of printing would lead to book titles being the forerunner to Clickbait! Why, I even spend at least a few minutes on each blog post trying to think up a catchy title! And if I’m too lazy, I try to edit the lede so that it sounds attractive. I try to convince myself that I’m honing my writing skills to be a better communicator, but maybe I’m subconsciously trying to attract a click!

And to get you to come back? I will discuss Blair’s fascinating chapter on Note-Taking. Interested in how and why scholars and students took notes? Did you know that there are instruction manuals for note-taking? Clever strategies and devices? How to organize all those notes you’ve taken? That’s coming up next!