The art of decimation: there is too much of everything!

Extract from an interview by Nicholas Fraser with Umberto Eco in The Sunday Times (1/10/95):

I wondered whether he browsed the Internet for pleasure. Did he believe Utopia was at hand? "I browse for some hours a week only," he says. "The problem - it's a delightful one, really - is that you never know what you can find. There's too much of everything. In the end the abundance of information can paralyse, just like the excess of food, sleep or love. A man in America has put photographs of his colon on the Internet, and I think this is remarkable - just imagine using cyberspace to exhibit your insides in public. The future of education will consist in telling people how to select or reject information. I'm beginning to teach my students the art of decimation. How do you know something will be useful any more? How do you acquire enough information about information? This is better than the old Big Brother problem we had under communism, about whether you were being brainwashed or not, but I suppose it's a serious one, too."