Paul Otlet Envisioned the Internet Before Computers, Without Computers (2014)

"I can access more material than I could read in a lifetime, from an iPad. It’s pretty crazy when you think about it, and I’m thankful for it."

I too am thankful for it. Although, I see this as a blessing and a curse.

It's now so hard to stay focused on anything specific, so time consuming to wade through all the useful and non-useful information, so full of distractions and misinformation. If you know where to look it's wonderful, but I feel the same a way about good books, magazine or blog.

When I was a kid, I remember my grandmother had The Encyclopaedia Britannica. It was wonderfully simple and enjoyable to read through. Every page felt interesting and exciting.

I don't really get this feeling from anything online.

The Internet is wonderful, I wish people respected it more.

Terry Pratchett's Going Postal has a bit of that.

That problem, and the problem of finding quality information, is precisely what's driven multiple information rationalisers.

It's a sentiment I first had on entering my uni library and its 3 million or so volumes, recognising I'd never be able to access more than a tiny fraction of them. The limits of human information processing are formidable.

Mortimer Adler's How to Read a Book inspires me, perhaps, to try to attempt "How to Read 10,000 books", that being a sustained rate of 150 books a year over about 65 years, or one every two days or so. The answer would have to involve not reading much of them, as well as other techniques.

You can find the sentiments in Ecclesiastes ("Much study is a weariness of the flesh, and of the making of books there is no end."), Seneca, Diderot (his commentary on information overload is a classic), Schopenhauer, and many more.

The notion that a better bibliographic control can solve the problem is a compelling and attractive one, but also ... at odds with actual experience. It's a possiblity I'm pursuing myself (how I happened to come across Otlet), though the problems he encountered, of creating, maintaining, sustaining, and using the index, seem formidable.

With the rise of the World Wide Web and search engines, the approach has generally been toward full-text search combined with a measure of reputational assessment, rather than topical or semantic assessment, though multiple (mostly abortive) attempts at a semantic Web have been made.

My thought is that a hybrid approach combining elements, but not obsessing over the purity of any one method, might be an improvement.