A relative emailed me this morning with this video. I’ve seen it before—it’s a couple years old—but it’s fun to revisit. Particularly thought-provoking is the comment in the video that:
It is estimated that a week’s worth of the New York Times contains more information than a person was likely to come across in a lifetime in the 18th Century.
This fits with Bruno Latour’s hypothesis that the drastic advances in science and technology in the modern era are the result of individuals being able to see and compare diverse sources of information at once—a feat difficult, if not impossible before the printing press and other modern technologies of “inscription.” He quotes Eisenstein:
Whether the sixteenth-century astronomer confronted materials derived from the fourth century B.C. or freshly composed in the fourteenth century A.D., or whether he was more receptive to scholastic or humanist currents of thoughts, seems of less significance in this particular connection than the fact that all manners of diverse materials were being seen in the course of one life time by one pair of eyes. For Copernicus as for Tycho, the result was heightened awareness and dissatisfaction with discrepancies in the inherent data. (1979:602)
Eisenstein’s work has been critiqued as overly deterministic. I won’t make an argument here either way. In either case, the notion is especially provocative when you think about it in the context of how much information is available instantly for comparison today.
