I have been a fan of James Gleick’s writing for well over a decade (I have some autographed books!). His latest work ‘The Information’ covers a lot of the ground I have been thinking about with regard to the Gutenberg Parenthesis.
With this premise in mind, I find that his coverage of the changes we are seeing (and about to see…more of) in how we deal with information, media, and even the idea of text is wonderfully refreshing. Instead of publishers whining about the future or humanities elites inventing words to go beyond ‘discursive reality’…Mr. Gleick presents a far broader and deeper perspective upon the nature of information and how we have been shaped by it.
How our bits shape us: James Gleick’s “The Information”
http://www.niemanlab.org/2011/05/how-our-bits-shape-us-james-gleicks-the-information
Circumscribing information, or words as things
One of the more poignant sections of James Gleick ’s The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood concerns the history of attempts to identify, count, and define every word in a natural language; in other words, treating words as things — as information.
An early effort — Robert Cawdrey’s 16th century Table Alphabeticall, only one copy of which has survived — defined 2500 English words. The current edition of the OED lists about 60,000 words that were in use in 1600. Today, the most high-profile efforts to precisely count the number of English words are hoaxes, but suffice it to say, we probably passed a million English words a while ago. The Oxford English Dictionary’s first editor, James Murray, observed that “the circle of the English language has a well-defined center but no discernible circumference.”
This was when lexicographers were overwhelmingly concerned only with high-legitimacy printed sources, and the task of drawing such a circumference was still thought to be possible. All that was needed were a sufficient number of index cards, metal files, wooden boxes, and amateur assistants — the first Wikipedians. As Gleick writes, “the task seemed formidable but finite.”
Universal information or computing power
The invention of writing probably allowed us to think of information as a discrete object, not limited to what was contained in human minds. The invention of computing allowed us to see information everywhere — in electrical waves, strands of DNA, and the firing of a brain’s neurons irrespective of a mind’s content.
Retrospectively, computing even helps us think about very old modes of communication — alphabetic writing, African drum language, the bonfire signals used in Aeschylus’s Agamemnon or Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings — as information networks, however imperfect.
Along the way, people used a host of metaphors to try to understand the developments they were witnessing and helping to create. “Net-work” is one of these. Another, particularly persistent in the nineteenth century with the rise of the telephone and telegraph, was conceiving of the new form of telecommunications as a global nervous system. In the twentieth century, this stopped being a metaphor, when neurologists and cognitive scientists began treating nerves as electronic message-carriers. What was important wasn’t the fact that both telegraph switches and nerve signals were electrical, but that both transmitted information.
Gleick’s book tells both of these histories, of technical achievements and conceptual breakthroughs, from premodernity to the present. It also shows how every new achievement, every breakthrough, brought new opportunities and new anxieties.
“The advent of the printing press certainly created anxieties that have the identical flavor to those we feel now,” Gleick told me. “I think they must surely be worse at times of transition when new technologies come along like the printing press or the telegraph or our electronic world.
Carrying the news
For instance, in the nineteenth century, commentators argued that the telegraph, rapidly expanding in both reach and popularity, would soon do away with newspapers:
Anticipated at every point by the lightning wings of the Telegraph, [newspapers] can only deal in local ‘items’ or abstract speculations. Their power to create sensations, even in election campaigns, will be greatly lessened — as the infallible Telegraph will contradict their falsehoods as fast as they can publish them.
Instead, as Gleick notes, “newspapers could not wait to put the technology to work. Editors found that any dispatch seemed more urgent and thrilling with the label ‘Communicated by Electric Telegraph.’” Several startup newspapers even took to naming themselves “the Telegraph” — it sounded fast and modern, and suggested that what newspapermen did, too, was “writing at a distance.”
This is just a fraction of the problems we’re grappling with, for which The Information offers both perspective and paradoxes.
“We are all patrons of the Library of Babel now,” Gleick writes, “and we are the librarians, too. We veer from elation to dismay and back.”
