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Lift12 speaker profile: Anaïs Saint-Jude on technological overload
December 15, 2011 - 11:22 — Alexandre Renevier
Anaïs Saint-Jude is the founder and director of the Stanford University's BiblioTech Program. She has researched this feeling of overload over the ages, and will put it in perspective during the Lift12 opening session. Some of her ideas and findings will help the audience build a better relationship to the mass of information that surrounds us.
Why did we invite Anais? Lift12 curator Laurent Haug explains:
"Technological overload is everywhere. I don't know anyone who doesn't think he or she has too many emails. As most of us feel overwhelmed, we look for solutions in the external world. You know, better email clients, prioritization systems, filters, etc. Well, there is a good and a bad news. The good: there is a solution. The bad: it is not a tool. It is our perception of things.
Technological overload is not new. In fact,the oldest traces of overload I could find date of 1613, when Barnaby Rich (British author) wrote that “one of the diseases of this age is the multiplicity of books; they doth so overcharge the world that it is not able to digest the abundance of idle matter that is every day hatched and brought forth into the world“.
Every time humanity invents something that facilitates the movement of knowledge, overload seems to be the lot of the first generations that have to deal with it. And with the web being probably one of the biggest of these inventions, it is no wonder we will need a bit of time to adapt. And to accept the fact that there is too much information, and that it is ok. Nobody walks into a library feeling oppressed because, even if reading 1 book a day, a human being will only be able to read maybe 0.0001% of all the text that has been written. This is how we should approach the internet.
Anaïs' work will help us put this question in perspective, and I hope her presentation will help the audience react and find solution to a problem that is becoming more and more pervasive as technologies invade our lives."
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