The main topic of this entry is to talk about the flood of information, the flood of overload that is threatening to overburden us. And those of us born in the 1950s and 1960s are getting the full force of it.
Younger people will be totally accustomed to this overload. They were born into it and to them it is natural. Us oldies have had to re-align our lives and become accustomed to a bombardment of information.
Once we had one television channel, then there were two and eventually four. Today there are literally hundreds and that doesn't take account of Netflix, Amazon Prime et al. Once we listened to one radio station, now there are thousands from throughout the world that we can tune into.
Once we had to go to the library to find things out from text books, now we log onto the internet and have just about every fact known to man at our fingertips.
Once we wrote long letters by hand and sent them through the post and might receive a reply in two or three weeks if we were lucky. Now we send emails and get replies within minutes. How the world has changed. I'm not sure that too much knowledge is a good thing though. We can all suffer from overload.
The number of books published each year is simply phenomenal. Every time I wander round Waterstones I am knocked back by the number of new books. For me it all leads to a feeling of confusion - which to read, which not to read.
If lockdown went on forever I wouldn't have enough time to read all the new books I would like to. I think it was C. S. Lewis who said for every two new books you read you should read one old one. That's partly why I'm reading Charles Dickens again. I need escapism at the moment and Dickens gives that in spades.
Today we not only have those old fashioned thick paper things called books. We also have e-books and now audio books. In the latter we don't even have to use up energy looking at the printed word. For sometime I have subscribed to Audible and have a veritable stock of books to listen to. Then last week I found out that there are hundreds if not thousands of audio books available to download from my local library. So now I have aural overload as well.
I do find listening to books takes huge amounts of concentration and I find my mind wandering off on other things (that's the butterfly syndrome again).
I could listen to an audio book on my Steward Stroll but then what would happen to music? The same comments about the written word also applies to music. We are now flooded with downloads. Remember those days when we went to Virgin or HMV and delighted in looking through the shelves of vinyl LPs and bought one, took it home, unpacked it and popped it on the stereo and then spent over an hour reading the sleeve. I well remember marvelling when I bought Bridge Over Troubled Water by Simon and Garfunkel to find that the lyrics were printed on the back cover. That meant I could sing along with the title track or "So Long Frank Lloyd Wright" long before I actually knew who Frank Lloyd Wright was.
Now keeping up with all the new releases on Amazon Music or Spotify is virtually impossible. I do try and listen to their weekly digest which features a few tracks from the major new releases, but then there's all those playlists to listen to.
I remember putting together cassettes of my favourite tracks recorded off vinyl. So I had a 90 minute mix tape of the best of, say, Pink Floyd. The quality was scratchy and poor and I had to play them on a standalone tape machine. But there was always a feeling of achievement in successfully putting the tape together until it broke and unravelled in a spectacular way and you had to try and repair them with a splicing machine or rewind the tape using a pen in the contact holes. Now I walk round the village with a pair of wireless earbuds listening to a playlist on my mobile phone in almost perfect quality. How times have changed.
My main problem is coming to terms with all this and separating the wheat from the chaff, working out what to read, what to listen to and not "going round in circles" in so doing. I'm sure I will write more about this in the future.
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Thank you to everyone who is still following my daily blogs. I now have 365 people signed up to the group and most postings are being read by over 300 people (or at least are being opened by over 300 people). I would still love to sign up more though - next aim is to break through the 400 barrier.