There have always been more books in the library than you could ever read. There have always been more magazines than you would ever be able to keep up with, and more newspapers than could ever be relevant to you.
There has never been a point in modern history where there weren’t more bands on the planet than you could ever follow, more composers than you could ever get to know intimately, or more radio shows than you could ever be interested in.
You’d have to spend about 60 years with your eyes glued to a screen 24 hours a day in order to watch the 270,000 or so commercial films cataloged by the IMDB alone. (Make that 80 years if you wanted to leave time for sleeping. And add a zero if you even want to start thinking about TV.)
For all practical purposes, the amount of media available to us has essentially been infinite for a very long time. (As long as any of us have been alive, anyway.)
Are things really that much different now, simply because 100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute? (In case you’re wondering, that’s about 52.6 million hours of video every year.)
When a number that is already infinity for all practical purposes, becomes a slightly larger version of infinity, does it really make that much of a difference in our lives?
Maybe it’s time to start seeing art and information for what they really are, and in some sense, have always had the potential to be: A constant stream; An unyielding current that we can tap into or out of at will.
What is finite is our time, our attention and our energy. A good question to ask is whether we’re spending them on the right things.
From one perspective, sure, there’s more noise. You also have more power than ever before to make an even stronger signal.