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By Root 1061 0

boil down to two: filter and search. The harassed consumer of information turns to filters to separate the metal from the dross; filters include blogs and aggregators—the choice raises issues of trust and taste. The need for filters intrudes on any thought experiment about the wonders of abundant information. When Dennett imagined his Complete Poetry Network, he saw the problem. “The obvious counterhypothesis arises from population memetics,”♦ he said. “If such a network were established, no poetry lover would be willing to wade through thousands of electronic files filled with doggerel, looking for good poems.” Filters would be needed—editors and critics. “They flourish because of the short supply and limited capacity of minds, whatever the transmission media between minds.” When information is cheap, attention becomes expensive.

For the same reason, mechanisms of search—engines, in cyberspace—find needles in haystacks. By now we’ve learned that it is not enough for information to exist. A “file” was originally—in sixteenth-century England—a wire on which slips and bills and notes and letters could be strung for preservation and reference. Then came file folders, file drawers, and file cabinets; then the electronic namesakes of all these; and the inevitable irony. Once a piece of information is filed, it is statistically unlikely ever to be seen again by human eyes. Even in 1847, Augustus De Morgan, Babbage’s friend, knew this. For any random book, he said, a library was no better than a wastepaper warehouse. “Take the library of the British Museum, for instance, valuable and useful and accessible as it is: what chance has a work of being known to be there, merely because it is there? If it be wanted, it can be asked for; but to be wanted it must be known. Nobody can rummage the library.”♦

Too much information, and so much of it lost. An unindexed Internet site is in the same limbo as a misshelved library book. This is why the successful and powerful business enterprises of the information economy are built on filtering and searching. Even Wikipedia is a combination of the two: powerful search, mainly driven by Google, and a vast, collaborative filter, striving to gather the true facts and screen out the false ones. Searching and filtering are all that stand between this world and the Library of Babel.

In their computer-driven incarnations these strategies seem new. But they are not. In fact, a considerable part of the gear and tackle of print media—now taken for granted, invisible as old wallpaper—evolved in direct response to the sense of information surfeit. They are mechanisms of selection and sorting: alphabetical indexes, book reviews, library shelving schemes and card catalogues, encyclopedias, anthologies and digests, books of quotation and concordances and gazetteers. When Robert Burton held forth on all his “new news every day,” his “new paradoxes, opinions, schisms, heresies, controversies in philosophy, religion, &c,” it was by way of justifying his life’s great project, The Anatomy of Melancholy, a rambling compendium of all previous knowledge. Four centuries earlier, the Dominican monk Vincent of Beauvais tried to set down his own version of everything that was known, creating one of the first medieval encyclopedias, Speculum Maius, “The Great Mirror”—his manuscripts organized into eighty books, 9,885 chapters. His justification: “The multitude of books, the shortness of time and the slipperiness of memory do not allow all things which are written to be equally retained in the mind.”♦ Ann Blair, a Harvard historian of early modern Europe, puts it simply: “The perception of an overabundance of books fueled the production of many more books.”♦ In their own way, too, the natural sciences such as botany arose in answer to information overload. The explosion of recognized species (and names) in the sixteenth century demanded new routines of standardized description. Botanical encyclopedias appeared, with glossaries and indexes. Brian Ogilvie sees the story of Renaissance botanists as “driven by the need to master