Thanks to a tweet by George Siemens I came across Tim Kastelle’s Blog today. Besides a general recommendation forhis blog, I’d like to point out some posts explicitly that where very inspiring. The post Networks and the Information Glut discusses how “new” the phenomena of information overload really is:

Or think about Charles Darwin – over the course of scientific career he sent over 15,000 letters. It’s safe to assume that he received just as many. Think about how much time he would have spent reading & writing letters, and how much new information and ideas would have been included in that – it’s probably more than we’re spending writing our blogs, updating our statuses and twittering.

Furthermore he links to an interesting video that show the social network of 18th century scientists such as Voltaire (by Dan Edelstein)

Another post discusses the common prejudice that new media leeds to being less smart people and invoke Plato‘s argument that writing down things would result in making us stupid. Tim shows all the false assumptions and even calls Plato’s arguments dumb. Great one. Give him a read…