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the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, books and archival records remained the primary means of recording and distributing information. For that rea- son what we know about the early history of information, and related top- ics like early views on information overload—from the earliest writings, through the manuscript period, and even through the first half or more of the twentieth century—comes primarily from the physical books or docu- ments that have survived. These tend to be the work of individual authors or identifiable groups of writers. That for most of recorded history sur- viving historical records are primarily in book and archival form explains why book history holds such a central place in the history of information, especially before the growth of analog and digital telecommunication and storage systems in the twentieth centuries. Apart from my life-long focus on books and their history, the central role of the book in the early history of records, particularly up to the twentieth century, may help explain why I concentrate on the questions that I raise in these essays.
Methods of comparing the growth rates of electronic information versus physical or book or archival information were developed from social science techniques. Toward the end of the twentieth century, with the rapid expan- sion of television, for example, researchers suspected that the growth of elec- tronic information was surpassing the growth of information recorded and distributed by print. To study very large information flows new statistical research methods had to be developed, focusing on large-scale quantitative measurement rather than individual works. Social scientist Ithiel de Sola Pool measured the rapid growth of electronic media, including the growth of television, relative to the slower growth of print media from the 1960s. His pioneering study, published in 1983,6 confirmed that for at least the previous five decades books and print media represented only a very small and diminishing, though very significant, percentage of total information flow. I believe that it is reasonable to assume that the percentage of stored information recorded by books may remain small, yet very significant rela-
6 Pool, I. de S., “Tracking the Flow of Information,” Science 221 (12 August 1983): 609-13. Reprint- ed in Etheridge (ed.), Politics in Wired Nations. Selected Writings of Ithiel de Sola Pool (1998).
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