Overloaded, Under-informed | Blog | design mind

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In 1893 the Newark Ohio Daily Advocate ran a series of articles predicting what the world would look like in a hundred years.

"Every person" they said, "of fairly good education and of restless mind writes a book. As a rule, it is a superficial book, but it swells the bulk and it indicated the cerebral unrest that is trying to express itself. We have arrived at a condition in which more books are printed than the world can read. This is true not only of books that are not worth reading, but it is true of the books that are. All this I take to be the result of an intellectual enfranchisement that is new, and of a dissemination of knowledge instead of concentration of culture. Everybody wants to say something. But it is slowly growing upon the world that everybody has not got something to say. Therefore one may even at this moment detect the causes which will produce reaction. In 100 years there will not be so many books printed, but there will be more said. That seems to me to be inevitable."

Their vision for the future of media is one that we're living with today. Simply replace book with blog, Facebook, MySpace, text message or tweet, and we've clearly reached a point where the amount of media we generate has surpassed our capacity to absorb it all. We're still producing a vast number of printed books, but lamenting the death of print; while cheaper and quicker media streams continue to skyrocket. Naturally people are conflicted, many feeling overwhelmed with the shear variety and velocity of media, but also empowered; "Everybody wants to say something" is a reality and a promise.

When the article says "Everybody wants to say something. But it is slowly growing upon the world that everybody has not got something to say," I see the present day. We're at an ...

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