The 19th-Century Philosopher Who Predicted Data Overload
When it comes to information, more is not always better
Ours is a noisy time, but it is not only acoustic noise that is worrisome. A more treacherous clamor is mental noise: the flood of images and information — some useful, most not — that bombards us incessantly. The decibel levels for mental noise are off the chart.
The magnitude of this problem may be larger than ever, but the problem is not new. Some 150 years ago, a grumpy German philosopher (redundant, I know) named Arthur Schopenhauer worried aloud about the proliferation of information, and with it mental noise.
Mental noise does more than disturb. It masks. In a noisy environment, we lose the signal, and our way. Some two centuries before email, the cluttered inbox worried Schopenhauer.
In his essay “On Authorship,” the philosopher foreshadows the mind-numbing racket that is social media, where the sound of the true is drowned out by the noise of the new. “No greater mistake can be made than to imagine that what has been written latest is always the more correct; that what is written later on is an improvement on what was written previously; and that every change means progress.”
