Introduction: Overload

Too much to do, too little time in which to do it: the dilemma is as old as mankind, but its modern form is in some ways radically different from its ancient one. In ancient and pre-modern times, distances were obstacles, and circulation and communication were slow, if not impossible: too little time to bridge distances and to send messages from one place to another. In the contemporary world, distances are increasingly foreshortened, intervals practically non-existent: too little time to create enough analytic distance even to think and to process the information contained in instantaneous messages and data. What are the implications of this evolution? The contributors to this issue of SubStance explore a variety of dimensions of the dilemma created by the “too much.”