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information, building since the telegraph in the nineteenth century, and ad- ditionally amplified from radio and television in the early twentieth century, was exponentially multiplied when communication technologies converged on the Internet in the late twentieth century, to the extent that informa- tion overload became a buzzword. And yet these problems of scale, though enormously increased, are not entirely new, as Denis Diderot raised aspects of them in the mid-eighteenth century when the number of printed books seemed to be getting out of hand. Even when Diderot wrote the problem of information overload was by no means new to scholars. Long before the invention of printing, when manuscript books were comparatively, expen- sive, scarce and often difficult to obtain, scholars who demanded the most intimate understanding of long texts expressed concern that the number of books being produced was becoming excessive, and worried about their quality.
To cite only one example, which happens to come from medieval Arabic literature, in The Muqaddimah, written in 1377, the Arab polymath and histo- rian Ibn Khaldun worried about the great number of scholarly books then available in every field, so many that they could not be read in a lifetime. He recognized that the existence so many books resulted in the need for sum- maries in textbooks, which he understood served useful purposes. However, he considered summaries and condensations, as necessary as they were, to be detrimental to scholarship and the acquisition of good study habits. True scholarship, he believed, required painstaking study of long and detailed works over a considerable period of time.5
Until the development of analog recording devices such as photography, cinematography, microfilm, sound recording, and audio and video tape in
5 Rosenthal, Franz, “‘Of Making Many Books There is No End:’ The Classical Muslim View,” Atiyeh (ed.), The Book in the Islamic World: The Written Word and Communication in the Middle East (1995), p. 45. Ibn Khaldun’s specific words on these topics may be found in the one-volume condensation of Rosen- thal’s translation of The Muqaddimah, abridged and edited by N. J. Dawood (2005), chapter 6, section 34, the title of which is “The great number of scholarly works available is an obstacle on the path to attain- ing scholarship,” and section 35, which has the title “The great number of brief handbooks available on scholarly subjects is detrimental to the process of instruction” (pp. 414-416).
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