Modern society grants absurdly easy access to absolutely insane amounts of information.
I think at this point we all take for granted that you could quickly and easily look something up on Wikipedia while reading this article - without having to find another book in the bookshelf, for example. We might even have come so far as to not really think about the fact that we routinely have internet access during entire trans-oceanic flights, pushing the reach of instant communication via the internet into places that only decades ago were completely isolated.
Global deployment of the internet has outpaced and surpassed more or less all other infrastructure in human history. There is internet connectivity in places where there has never been any infrastructure of any kind, and if there is any kind of infrastructure, odds that there are multiple options for internet connectivity rise sharply.
Contrast with another example of highly developed infrastructure - roads.
Even taking the absolutely most generous definition, there is nowhere close to a road everywhere. Not that we would want that, but even given some reasonable minimum distance criterion roads simply have no chance to compete with the global reach of the internet.
The height of the renaissance, movable type is revolutionizing production of and access to information.
If you were born at this time and had some modest impossibilities like the ability to access all documents being produced within some distance, it would be impossible for you to read everything simply due to the volume of documents and correspondence moving around Europe, let alone the rest of the world.
Industrialization is well underway and information is cheaper, more readily accessible than ever.
A person born at that time might, in the case of an extremely studious individual, expect to be able to fill all of their waking time reading scientific discoveries. Someone else might read a dime novel every day of their life. At this point in time or hereabout, the point came when there was not only too much literary output of humanity as a whole for any one individual to keep up, but there were a large number of topics/genres one could limit their reading to and still have no chance of keeping up.
Now it's getting tricky, because the pace of change has become high enough to make it untenable to paint an entire life with a single brush. It was starting to become problematic in the 1850 example as well, but with a bit of squinting and careful choice of person and location it would still work well enough for my purposes there.
So instead of looking at an entire hypothetical life, we look at a single projection of how life might look, based on the conditions around the time of birth.
A person born in 1900 is seeing the beginnings of both radio and moving pictures. Both of these will quickly begin to produce enough content that this person could easily spend all their time listening to radio or watching movies.
Unlike our 1450 character, we don't need any supernatural abilities either. In 1850 we may have needed some pretty significant means in order to procure new content at a sufficient pace to stay overwhelmed, but by 1900 it would be fairly cheap to constantly consume content, either in text, sound or picture form. There would certainly be enough on offer without needing any real effort to find new content to consume. In the most extreme example of the radio it could quite literally be a matter of finding a single frequency once, and then listening forever.
It is interesting that I am involuntarily starting to turn my thinking from trying to keep up with a field to trying to maximize media consumption.
The point is just that there is an absolutely mind-boggling amount of information out there, and has been for a very long time. And in parallel with the growth of the raw amount of new (let alone total available) information, there has been an explosive growth in the accessibility of that same information.
Say it takes one day to read a book. I guess it's some kind of average book. Further, let's arbitrarily decide that that same book took 5 years to produce.
Now, how many people must work full-time on creating books for it to become impossible for me to keep up? Well, 5 years is 365*5 = 1825 days, so if I can read a book a day, I can read up to 1825 books in 5 years. As long as no more than 1825 books are released in those 5 years, I'm safe, I can keep up with everything. So, if 1826 people each produce a book every 5 years, there will be one book to many for me to have time to finish.
Now consider the number of people in your city or your country who create information in some capacity. Filmmakers and authors are obvious, as is the video game industry and other media empires. But think of all the pages of legislation that get passed each year, all the reports, budgets, planning documents, shopping lists and sexts.
The really shocking realization, at least to me, is something else however. Coming back to the daily book that takes 5 years to make, what happens if instead of having one person try to read everything, we have two?
If they divide their efforts, they can cover twice as many books, but then they share absolutely no information between them. The more they want to share information with each other, the more overlap they will have and the less they can cover, to the point of total overlap where it is as though there were only one person reading.
The implication is that as the population grows and more information becomes available, it becomes ever more absurdly impossible for an individual to keep track of the totality of anything. Further, it will become simultaneously impossible for humanity as a whole to keep track of everything in any centralized way, due to the synchronization scaling problem above.
In modern society, you need not consider a very large radius before the amount of information immediately available is not only overwhelming to any given individual, but to humanity as a whole.
Generally, that radius would be just short of the distance to the closest smartphone.