Monday, November 22, 2021

I heard the [internet drowns you in information] again line recently, and understood how completely stupid it is.

Imagine a library. Imagine a vast shelf, full of myriad books. Imagine every single book is pages and pages of pictures of cats in different poses.

Are you 'drowning' in information? 

Imagine somewhere in that vast shelf is a book on, say, carpentry. If you want to find it then sure you're drowning in something. Signals, maybe, but not information. One wonders how a carpentry book ended up in there at all. It would seem most writers would know better than to write at all for such an institution, and if some poor lost carpenter did write anyway, they wouldn't put it in with the cat books. As far as you're concerned it might as well be a wall of TVs full of static, and you need to find the one that occasionally displays a map.

Speaking of noise, it's not just a vast library full of cat pictures (and porn). All the library's patrons are shouting. You can't even look through a cat book without dozens trying to seize your attention. It would seem the librarians are not only lax but actually outlawed. 

Nobody who deals with information is foolish enough to come to the internet to do it.

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