Swiss scientist Conrad Gessner called for total government regulation over a ubiquitous hand-held media device that threatened to flood our minds with information causing "confusing and harmful" results.
Which tablet or phone was he talking about in this dumbed-down post-truth world of the internet, Google and Twitter?
None of them. He was talking in 1565 about books, in the wake of Gutenberg's printing press.
Gessner came to mind when Google released its list of Australia's top searches for 2016. Because when you look at what we are doing with the internet you find that – despite many dire warnings that we are getting dumbed-down by fake news – it appears that we are an inquisitive outward-looking people and that our devices might, astoundingly, be making us smarter.
The name Google is a play on googol (the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeros) reflecting the idea of organising a seemingly infinite amount of information. And yes, I Googled that.
Australia's most searched person was disgraced rugby league player Mitchell Pearce. Others to make the top 10 were Pauline Hanson, Mel McLaughlin and Sonia Kruger.
What's interesting about each of these people is that they were involved in controversies about women and their roles in society.
On Australia Day, Pearce got drunk and behaved shockingly. But we can draw one positive from the experience. People will not excuse infantile, non-consensual behaviour by a man – even a football star. Pearce was suspended for eight NRL matches.
McLaughlin was insultingly told "don't blush, baby" by cricketer Chris Gayle, while Kruger and Hanson were controversial (among other things) for their remarks about LGBTI kids and Muslims.
The most searched topic for the year was the US election, while the Australian election barely rated a mention. That's either an indication that we swoon under the cultural influence of America or that we are bored with our own banal brand of politics. Or perhaps both. We then searched for the Olympics, the ill-fated census, the ubiquitous Donald Trump, David Bowie and Prince.
When it comes to the eternal question – why? – we wondered prosaically why there was a leap day and then perhaps more poetically why the sky was blue. And then most appropriately of all, why the internet was so slow.
But for the answer to that you'd have to ask the ninth most popular search for an Australian – Malcolm Turnbull.
Slow internet or not, today a world of information is at everyone's fingertips. Yes, we must remain vigilant for partisan and ill-informed information. But on the whole more people have more access to more knowledge than at any time in history.
Gessner would be shocked but that surely cannot be a bad thing.
Duncan Fine is a lawyer and commentator.
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