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EDITORIAL2327
February 2010
Paradox of Choice
Conservation is, above all, about making decisions. In conservation, ideas, knowledge and decision-making are essential for good practice. After all, it is those decisions that have a deep implication in the future survival of a work of art. However, to make decisions requires not only experience but also information and time: time to imagine, time for reflection, time to find the most appropriate solution. The problem is that at the present current pace we no longer seem to have available that required time.
Nowadays, information and time are deeply linked. Not long ago I was discussing with a friend about the difference between the newer and older generations of conservators. When we think more precisely about these differences, we find that before there was more time for reflection but limited access to information whilst today we virtually have access to any possible information source but quite limited time for its perusal. Bibliographic resources were once scarcer, as was also the access to scientific research. Today there are hundreds of books published in our field every year in both conservation and conservation-science areas. However, are we better conservators for this? Are we now able to make better decisions that will ensure the survival of works of art for future generations? The last decade and a half has been characterised by the boom of information technologies and the World Wide Web. In fact, today we have access to a potentially unfathomable amount of information like never before in the entire History of Man. Nevertheless, I believe we stay as ignorant as ever. Diderot once said that there would come a time “when it will be almost as difficult to learn anything from books as from the direct study of the whole universe”. Those times can’t be very far away anymore. Right now the problem is no longer if there is information about a certain issue, but how to find it. Information access is a real problem, for example, the search for a technical sheet of a product is probably as difficult as it was 20 years ago. Furthermore, I would argue about the validity of the information sources we use nowadays but that would digress to a whole new topic. Returning to the present, today we can hardly let a day pass without checking our email or doing some search on the internet. However, no actual useful information is necessarily being found in these ways. In the end we spend our time dealing with a lot of worthless information and we can often end up making decisions based on incomplete data which may be useless out of context. Even I usually thrive on more information, such as when I find a new website or book, however these tend to be equally and easily forgotten as soon as I discover yet another website or book. This ends up being like the paradox of choice: the more we have, the more confused we get. And we must confess that indeed the access to more information does not necessarily make us better professionals. This is the situation of today. But I wonder, what does the future reserve for us? Will we perhaps be more organised? Or will we just get more confused? So… wait and see. Rui Bordalo, Executive Editor
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