“A weekday issue of the New York Times contains more information than the average person was likely to come across in an entire lifetime in the seventeenth century.” Variants of this statement (give or take a couple of centuries) are commonly seen when reading about Information Overload. Of course I agree that there’s more information available today than back in centuries past, but this particular statement always seemed suspicious to me. Is it true? And what if it is?

First, it probably depends on what we mean by “information”. Is it printed information? In past centuries a sizable fraction of the population was close to illiterate, so many people back then had no use for the printed word, pulling the average down. But they had other information, which was not to be found in books: even the humblest peasant acquired a wealth of information in his lifetime – from how to gauge the best time to plant his field to how to efficiently skin a rabbit, two items that would baffle the vast majority of New Yorkers today (to be fair, the latter also have a good deal of such “tacit knowledge” – how to program a VCR, if anyone still does, for example – that is also absent from the Sunday paper).

But let’s limit ourselves to educated people. Did Newton, or Galileo, or Leibniz, or Descartes, or Shakespeare, or their other cultured contemporaries, access less information in their entire life than fills a single issue of our daily paper?

I haven’t studied the matter rigorously, and I’d love to know if anyone had – but it sounds quite dubious to me even when taken literally in terms of bits and bytes. After all, those old timers invariably did have access to the bible, and I doubt the NYT has more text in it than that venerable book, even if you include the advertising. And when you get right down to it, you also have to consider the value of the information. The phone directory is full of information, after all, yet no one would compare it to Newton’s Principia Mathematica (which was a good deal thinner). And, though more interesting than the white pages, the NYT is no match for the bible either.

Bottom line, unless we measure “information” in the most literal-minded and meaningless way, we should rethink the statement about those poor ancestors: they had plenty of access to intelligent, useful, valuable information that served them well. And they had one major advantage over us: the signal to noise ratio in the information they had was much, much better than what we suffer at present. They actually had to walk (or ride) to get their information in printed form; and it cost them good money. As a result, they only tended to access what they could actually read, chosen by them for its value. By contrast, we have information pushed at us in huge quantities through the Internet, and for free; and most of us lack the self control to filter it properly. That is where the real problem of Information Overload comes from, not the length of the daily paper. One look at my Inbox, and I can’t help but envy Isaac Newton, sitting quietly under his apple tree, thinking, with less information than that in a single edition of the NY Times.