Information Overload

Jon Stewart dolloping out our daily dose of future shock

In my senior year in high school, I read a book called Future Shock by Alvin Toffler. In it is a graph that shows the amount of information humanity had accumulated from the beginning of recorded history to the then present.

For the most part, it hugs the bottom with very little change, taking noticeable up moves during the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the Industrial Revolution. By the time it reaches it terminus in 1970, the graph turns into a hockey stick as it incorporates the computer age and communications satellites. You can imagine what that graph would like forty years and the Internet later.

Despite the fact that our brains contain 100 billion nerve cells, with all the trillions of permutational possibilities that their cross-connections provide for cognitive processing, memory, feeling, etc., it’s good to know that someone is helping us make sense of it all.