The historian Lisa Jardine reflects that information overload is not a new problem. "By the seventeenth-century there was widespread anxiety that the sheer volume of available knowledge was getting out of hand." There were also fears that wars and unrest could obliterate knowledge through the destruction of archives. Nowadays, losing knowledge completely is harder thanks to the internet, but the need to sift it is as great as ever.
Producer: Sheila Cook.
Published on Friday, 6th January 2012.
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