Until that moment, I had thought that the magic of the information age was that it allowed us to know more, but then I realized the magic of the information age is that it allows us to know less.
In the last two weeks I have reached a tipping point of sorts. Two weeks ago Friday, I took my comprehensive exam for my MLIS. Naturally I was relieved to have this hurdle behind me - the more so when one week ago, I learned that I had passed. I had no troubled conscience over taking things easy the week immediately following the exam. Of course, I had let some things slide while I was preparing for the exam, and I let a few more things slide while I was recovering. I had planned to plunge headlong into my remaining coursework last week, catching up with what I had neglected, even (so I hoped) picking off a few small written assignments ahead of their due dates so that I could concentrate on the remaining major projects which are all that stand between me and my destiny as a professional librarian.
But my plans have been thwarted by my own overloaded brain. It has often been observed that technology sometimes mitigates against concentration. (The banner on
one of my favorite blogs reads
"Computers make us more productive. Yeah, right." Or listen to this entertaining
podcast by Cory Doctorow on the monkish self discipline required to get things like reading done with a computer.) Indeed, information overload would appear to be one of the most serious and genuine threats confronting us in the age of ubiquitous computing and innumerable information channels.
What really pushed me over the edge last week was the weird convergence of ideas in the two courses I am trying to finish. For
Web Based Information Services, I added an article to
LISWiki on a cataloger who in the first half of the 20th century created her own relative classification for theological works. By complete coincidence, the topics under discussion for both that class and
Theological Librarianship were variations on the theme of metadata and classification schemes, with assigned readings from either course overlapping in interesting ways with the other, including one by that very cataloger. Also by complete coincidence, during my post-comps layoff I finally got around to finishing
Everything is Miscellaneous by David Weinberger. (Yes, I am such a geek I read mostly non-fiction for fun!) The fact is, I ended up with so many ideas and trying to participate in so many discussions that I locked up just like a Windows PC does when
it tries to multitask.
The gist of the David Brooks essay quoted at the top of this post is that we now have the ability to "outsource" our intellectual capacity to technology. Gadgets now organize and remember stuff for us, and can use the metadata associated with our own choices (ala Pandora & Amazon) to guide us in new decisions.
Lifehacker recently featured new products,
Exploratree and
Mind42 which promise to help me sort out the jumble I have created in my brain and think through my projects more clearly. I think I will give them a spin as I try to get myself back on track.
