Promises the codification of all knowledge. New technology can create an apparatus or a system of organization that Well, mere rhetoric (for all its inaccuracy, Schmidt’s rhetoric remains a great The fact-checkers have shown that this rhetoric is, Google’s Eric Schmidt has beenįact-checked for his rhetoric about the Internet’s capacity to encompass all Knowledge, and this is especially true today. After all, that is what people have done throughout the ages, imagined that they can possess total One order of knowledge) could not be other than fictive, reduced to theĭimensions of a catalogue, a nomenclature, or a survey” (88). Of the major tensions that inhabited the literate of the early modern age andĬaused them anxiety a universal library (or at least universal in RogerĬhartier writes in The Order of Books, “One One realm of knowledge that is eternally off-limits for any author. That he cannot pry into the heads of his readers, in the process identifying Ironically, thisĪuthor participating in the Renaissance endeavor to gain all knowledge admits Intriguingly describing the reader as an inscrutable textual judge whose isĭone behind a veil of secrecy (“The Utility of this Story” in the 1563 Acts and Monuments 1:26). Secret iudgementes of readers woulde conceaue” when reading his book, Readers will not see his book as satisfactory and admits that he cannot imagine Scotland, and Ireland contain prefatory writing by the authors thatĮxpresses their doubts about their works’ completeness. Thus, encyclopedic texts such as John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments, John Stow’sĪnnales of England, and Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, However, the very pursuit of complete knowledge prevented any oneĮncyclopedic text from sufficing since there was always more information to beĪdded to a text (my thinking on this is heavily indebted to Sarah Wall-Randell's brilliant article " Doctor Faustus and the Printer's Devil," which is available from Studies in English Literature, which is behind a paywall). The printing press served as the primary means for realizing thisĭream. Of one encyclopedic, unitary text that could encapsulate all that mankind couldĮver know. Previous eras in human history also imagined that they had developed theĬapacity to amass all knowledge.
Say the Internet, right? But how did people find all the information they couldĮver need, including the really important stuff, such as Ryan Reynolds’s full filmography, before the Internet? Surely To name a place that people could go to for all their information needs, you would