There’s nothing new about information overload. People were shaking their fists at the sky when the printing press entered our lives.
Erasmus of Rotterdam (1488–1538) proved to be an early media critic. Printing presses, he said “fill the world with pamphlets and books that are foolish, ignorant, malignant, libelous, mad, impious and subversive; and such is the flood that even things that might have done some good lose all their goodness.”
But to confront this new challenge, printers, scholars, and compilers began to develop novel ways to manage all these texts – tools that listed, sorted under subject headings, summarized, and selected from all those books that no one person could master.
Source: Ann Blair, in the Boston Globe, November 28
Video 3 in the Internment series has been posted at YouTube.
Eric Koch’s book, The Weimar Triangle, is available at Indigo-Chapters and in your local bookstore. 
I wonder what Erasmus would have thought about the new e-readers like Kobo and Kindle. It’s impossible – for better or worse – to stop the flow of words, but how wonderfully convenient and efficient to contain them in one small device over which one has total control!
When Erasmus was my age he had been dead for 15 years. Thanks to TOM leHer (sp?)
But the new ways haven’t stopped the publication of texts that are foolish, ignorant, malignant, etc.