Even in pre-internet times there was a lot of content - so much so that you were never going to be able to absorb it all. The advantage of those times for me, aside from being young and not realizing this limitation, was that my vision of that content was very narrow: what happened to be on the shelves of the local bookstore or library was the extent of my exposure. Indexes of content were also fairly small and very curated. A finite curated encyclopedia served as our primary index to the world in general - and would only change once per year when the new year book and index would come out. The problem you describe existed then, but we were shielded from having to stare directly down into the maw unadulterated content by editors and publishers and the economics of media distribution and advertising.

Fast forward to today - and you have machine mediated lists of content - as much and more than you can absorb. The cost to publish and advertise has concurrently gone down to allow anyone with a computer to add their noise to the overall stream - this response being a prime example.

Curators are at a premium - finding someone to stand intelligently between you and the deluge of information is what I think we need more today. The key to selecting a curator is trust…and we could probably use more ‘Pinterest’ - like services that provide a platform for smart curation. I think it is still some time before computers can do better at that than humans, as your article and the experiences of most of us bare out.