I recently read an article that in a library journal that as early as 1934, Ortega y Gasset startled librarians when he delivered an essay entitled "the Mission of the Librarians." Essentially insisting that the modern books have become uncontrollable, too many being published ergo,too many to read, and worse, "many of them are useless and stupid; their existence and their conservation is a dead weight upon humanity which is already bent low under other loads." Ortega Gasset, writes of this proliferation :
There are already too many books. Even when we drastically reduce the number of subjects to which man must direct his attention, the quantity of books that he must absorb is so enormous that it exceeds the limits of his time and his capacity of assimilation. Merely the work of orienting oneself in a bibliography of a subject today represents considerable effort for an author and to be a total loss. For once he he has completed this part of the work, the author discovers that he cannot read all that he ought to read. This leads him to read too fast and to read badly; it moreover leaves him with an impression of powerlessness and failure, and finally scepticism towards his own work.
If each new generation continues to accumulate printed paper in the same proportion as the last few generations, the problem posed by the excess of books will become truly terrifying.
His solution: librarians in charge of what gets published!...gatekeepers of knowledge!
imagine the implications of this, librarians repudiating the First amendment! We truly would be the Book Nazi!
Given what has happened with the Internet I wonder what would happen to a systematic man like Ortega y Gassett when faced with the 21st century's proliferation of information in not only print, that's bad enough, but in digital format!
Totally out of control!
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