> It's undeniable that the pace of creation of masterpieces has quickened dramatically at an unprecedented level.

Yes and no. As far as I can tell, the pace of content creation and distribution has been exponentially increasing since at least the Renaissance. So, while it is undeniably true that the current pace is unprecedented, it has also been true at any point in the past you care to examine. This means that the feeling of being overwhelmed by a deluge of new information is something of a constant throughout history.

It doesn’t increase exponentially all the time. It’s tied in to changes with how information is dispersed.

The printing press, the telegraph, radio, tv, the internet, and most recently the mobile internet are some of the reasons for increases in the firehose of information being thrown in our faces.

Here’s an excellent book on the subject https://www.amazon.com/Amazing-Ourselves-Death-Introduction-...

I don't understand why it's so hard to understand this. The internet and mobile communication have undoubtedly ushered in an entirely new era.

> It has also been true at any point in the past you care to exam

I figured you would say this, which is why I stressed that we have crossed some kind of threshold. The effect of the internet, cheap electronics, free online resources as well as the fact that we now have 8 billion people in this world all culminate to set the stage for an entirely new era of creativity.

We are living in the New Renaissance. People will be discussing this era in history books for a very long time, like we do the Renaissance now. Why do we focus on the Renaissance and not the period of creation between then and now? Because it marked an unprecedentedly different era of creativity. And here we are again. So your mention of the Renaissance really only strengthens my argument.

We talk plenty about 18th and 19th century creators. That's Dickens, Dumas, Beethoven, Mozart, Wagner, Brahms, Chopin, Paganini, Mahler, Tchaikovsky, Swift, Defoe, Washington Irving, Wordsworth, Rousseau, Louisa May Alcott, Hans Christian Anderson, Lewis Carrol, the Bronte sisters, Jane Austen, Emily Dickinson, Doyle, Elliott, Emerson, the Brothers Grimm, Charles Darwin, Victor Hugo, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Kipling, Melville, Nietzsche, Proust, Shelley, R.L.Stevenson, Thoreau, Twain, H.G. Wells, and many more.

Their works are all over 100 years old and regularly read (or performed) today, long predating the internet and most predating the telephone. The internet is still way too new to say how history will remember it, and I don't see any evidence that the creativity explosion that started in the Renaissance ever stopped.

You completely ignored everything I said. Listing a large amount of historical artists does nothing to refute that we have more today than ever before.

It's amazing you can point to the Renaissance as an obvious point in history where things transitioned but you aren't able to see it happening right now around us.

> Listing a large amount of historical artists does nothing to refute that we have more today than ever before.

Of course it doesn’t, I agree with this statement wholeheartedly. However, the changes brought by the internet don’t feel categorically different than the ones that came from steamships, telegraphs, radio, film, telephone, railroads, or airplanes. Each of these innovations changed the world as we know it by making it easier for new ideas to spread, and a corresponding increase in the quantity of available content. You may be right that the internet has ushered in a new Renaissance, but history may also decide that the old one never really stopped, or that the seminal invention of this era was one of these earlier ones, or even one that doesn’t get invented for another decade — predicting how history will judge the present is always difficult, and never certain.