Coping with the Information Overload: Strategies for Reading and Writing in the Digital Era

The modern printing press was developed in the 1400s. According to scholars, what followed was an "information overload" and the subsequent development of strategies and materials to cope with this overload. These strategies, of course, were developed in a pre-google, pre-blog, pre-kindle era. In this show, we discuss some of these pre-modern strategies and their applicability to the current information overload. Does having an ocean of digital information at one's fingertips facilitate our understanding? Or, does it overwhelm and intimidate us? We will discuss obstacles and challenges that we all face in the attaining and retaining of substantive information in the digital age.  We presume that the purpose of reading and writing is the "epiphanic experience" or "aha moment".  Given that such experiences are both pleasurable and valuable, they need to be perserved and maximized.  Thus, we will also discuss strategies for ovecoming the obstacles to these epiphanic experiences posed by the information overload.