The Information by James Gleick
For the same reason, mechanisms of search—engines, in cyberspace—find needles in haystacks. By now we’ve learned that it is not enough for information to exist. A “file” was originally—in sixteenth-century England—a wire on which slips and bills and notes and letters could be strung for preservation and reference. Then came file folders, file drawers, and file cabinets; then the electronic namesakes of all these; and the inevitable irony. Once a piece of information is filed, it is statistically unlikely ever to be seen again by human eyes. Even in 1847, Augustus De Morgan, Babbage’s friend, knew this. For any random book, he said, a library was no better than a wastepaper warehouse. “Take the library of the British Museum, for instance, valuable and useful and accessible as it is: what chance has a work of being known to be there, merely because it is there? If it be wanted, it can be asked for; but to be wanted it must be known. Nobody can rummage the library.”♦
Too much information, and so much of it lost. An unindexed Internet site is in the same limbo as a misshelved library book. This is why the successful and powerful business enterprises of the information economy are built on filtering and searching. Even Wikipedia is a combination of the two: powerful search, mainly driven by Google, and a vast, collaborative filter, striving to gather the true facts and screen out the false ones. Searching and filtering are all that stand between this world and the Library of Babel.
In their computer-driven incarnations these strategies seem new. But they are not. In fact, a considerable part of the gear and tackle of print media—now taken for granted, invisible as old wallpaper—evolved in direct response to the sense of information surfeit. They are mechanisms of selection and sorting: alphabetical indexes, book reviews, library shelving schemes and card catalogues, encyclopedias, anthologies and digests, books of quotation and concordances and gazetteers. When Robert Burton held forth on all his “new news every day,” his “new paradoxes, opinions, schisms, heresies, controversies in philosophy, religion, &c,” it was by way of justifying his life’s great project, The Anatomy of Melancholy, a rambling compendium of all previous knowledge. Four centuries earlier, the Dominican monk Vincent of Beauvais tried to set down his own version of everything that was known, creating one of the first medieval encyclopedias, Speculum Maius, “The Great Mirror”—his manuscripts organized into eighty books, 9,885 chapters. His justification: “The multitude of books, the shortness of time and the slipperiness of memory do not allow all things which are written to be equally retained in the mind.”♦ Ann Blair, a Harvard historian of early modern Europe, puts it simply: “The perception of an overabundance of books fueled the production of many more books.”♦ In their own way, too, the natural sciences such as botany arose in answer to information overload. The explosion of recognized species (and names) in the sixteenth century demanded new routines of standardized description. Botanical encyclopedias appeared, with glossaries and indexes. Brian Ogilvie sees the story of Renaissance botanists as “driven by the need to master the information overload that they had unwittingly produced.”♦ They created a “confusio rerum,” he says, “accompanied by a confusio verborum.” Confused mass of new things; confusion of words. Natural history was born to channel information.
When new information technologies alter the existing landscape, they bring disruption: new channels and new dams rerouting the flow of irrigation and transport. The balance between creators and consumers is upset: writers and readers, speakers and listeners. Market forces are confused; information can seem too cheap and too expensive at the same time. The old ways of organizing knowledge no longer work. Who will search; who will filter? The disruption breeds hope mixed with fear. In the first days of radio Bertolt Brecht, hopeful, fearful, and quite obsessed, expressed this feeling aphoristically: “A man who has something to say and finds no listeners is bad off. Even worse off are listeners who can’t find anyone with something to say to them.”♦ The calculus always changes. Ask bloggers and tweeters: Which is worse, too many mouths or too many ears?
EPILOGUE
(The Return of Meaning)
It was inevitable that meaning would force its way back in.
—Jean-Pierre Dupuy (2000)♦
THE EXHAUSTION, the surfeit, the pressure of information have all been seen before. Credit Marshall McLuhan for this insight—his most essential—in 1962:
We are today as far into the electric age as the Elizabethans had advanced into the typographical and mechanical age. And we are experiencing the same confusions and indecisions which they had felt when living simultaneously in two contrasted forms of society and experience.♦
But as much as it is the same, this time it is different. We are a half century further along now and can begin to see how vast the scale and how strong the effects of connectedness.
Once again, as in the first days of the telegraph, we speak of the annihilation of space and time. For McLuhan this was prerequisite to the creation of global consciousness—global knowing. “Today,” he wrote, “we have extended our central nervous systems in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned. Rapidly, we approach the final phase of the extensions of man—the technological simulation of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society.”♦ Walt Whitman had said it better a century before:
What whispers are these O lands, running ahead of you, passing under the seas?
Are all nations communing? is there going to be but one heart to the globe?♦
The wiring of the world, followed hard upon by the spread of wireless communication, gave rise to romantic speculation about the birth of a new global organism. Even in the nineteenth century mystics and theologians began speaking of a shared mind or collective consciousness, formed through the collaboration of millions of people placed in communication with one another.♦
Some went so far as to view this new creature as a natural product of continuing evolution—a way for humans to fulfill their special destiny, after their egos had been bruised by Darwinism. “It becomes absolutely necessary,” wrote the French philosopher Édouard Le Roy in 1928, “to place [man] above the lower plane of nature, in a position which enables him to dominate it.”♦ How? By creating the “noosphere”—the sphere of mind—a climactic “mutation” in evolutionary history. His friend the Jesuit philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin did even more to promote the noosphere, which he called a “new skin” on the earth:
Does it not seem as though a great body is in the process of being born—with its limbs, its nervous system, its centers of perception, its memory—the very body of that great something to come which was to fulfill the aspirations that had been aroused in the reflective being by the freshly acquired consciousness of its interdependence with and responsibility for a whole in evolution?♦
That was a mouthful even in French, and less mystical spirits considered it bunkum (“nonsense, tricked out with a variety of tedious metaphysical conceits,”♦ judged Peter Medawar), but many people were testing the same idea, not least among them the writers of science fiction.♦ Internet pioneers a half century later liked it, too.
H. G. Wells was known for his science fiction, but it was as a purposeful social critic that he published a little book in 1938, late in his life, with the title World Brain. There was nothing fanciful about what he wanted to promote: an improved educational system throughout the whole “body” of humanity. Out with the hodgepodge of local fiefdoms: “our multitude of unco-ordinated ganglia, our powerless miscellany of universities, research institutions, literatures with a purpose.”♦ In with “a reconditioned and more powerful Public Opinion.” His World Brain would rule the globe. “We do not want dictators, we do not want oligarchic parties or class rule, we want a widespread world intelligence conscious of itself.” Wells believed that a new technology was poised to revolutionize the production and distribution of information: microfilm. Tiny pictures of printed materials could be ma
This new world encyclopedia would transcend the static form of the book, printed in volumes, said Wells. Under the direction of a wise professional staff (“very important and distinguished men in the new world”), it would be in a state of constant change—“a sort of mental clearinghouse for the mind, a depot where knowledge and ideas are received, sorted, summarized, digested, clarified and compared.” Who knows whether Wells would recognize his vision in Wikipedia? The hurly-burly of competing ideas did not enter into it. His world brain was to be authoritative, but not centralized.
It need not be vulnerable as a human head or a human heart is vulnerable. It can be reproduced exactly and fully, in Peru, China, Iceland, Central Africa.… It can have at once the concentration of a craniate animal and the diffused vitality of an amoeba.
For that matter, he said, “It might have the form of a network.”
It is not the amount of knowledge that makes a brain. It is not even the distribution of knowledge. It is the interconnectedness. When Wells used the word network—a word he liked very much—it retained its original, physical meaning for him, as it would for anyone in his time. He visualized threads or wires interlacing: “A network of marvellously gnarled and twisted stems bearing little leaves and blossoms”; “an intricate network of wires and cables.”♦ For us that sense is almost lost; a network is an abstract object, and its domain is information.
The birth of information theory came with its ruthless sacrifice of meaning—the very quality that gives information its value and its purpose. Introducing The Mathematical Theory of Communication, Shannon had to be blunt. He simply declared meaning to be “irrelevant to the engineering problem.” Forget human psychology; abandon subjectivity.
He knew there would be resistance. He could hardly deny that messages can have meaning, “that is, they refer to or are correlated according to some system with certain physical or conceptual entities.” (Presumably a “system with certain physical or conceptual entities” would be the world and its inhabitants, the kingdom and the power and the glory, amen.) For some, this was just too cold. There was Heinz von Foerster at one of the early cybernetics conferences, complaining that information theory was merely about “beep beeps,” saying that only when understanding begins, in the human brain, “then information is born—it’s not in the beeps.”♦ Others dreamed of extending information theory with a semantic counterpart. Meaning, as ever, remained hard to pin down. “I know an uncouth region,” wrote Borges of the Library of Babel, “whose librarians repudiate the vain and superstitious custom of finding a meaning in books and equate it with that of finding a meaning in dreams or in the chaotic lines of one’s palm.”♦
Epistemologists cared about knowledge, not beeps and signals. No one would have bothered to make a philosophy of dots and dashes or puffs of smoke or electrical impulses. It takes a human—or, let’s say, a “cognitive agent”—to take a signal and turn it into information. “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and information is in the head of the receiver,”♦ says Fred Dretske. At any rate that is a common view, in epistemology—that “we invest stimuli with meaning, and apart from such investment, they are informationally barren.” But Dretske argues that distinguishing information and meaning can set a philosopher free. The engineers have provided an opportunity and a challenge: to understand how meaning can evolve; how life, handling and coding information, progresses to interpretation, belief, and knowledge.
Still, who could love a theory that gives false statements as much value as true statements (at least, in terms of quantity of information)? It was mechanistic. It was desiccated. A pessimist, looking backward, might call it a harbinger of a soulless Internet at its worst. “The more we ‘communicate’ the way we do, the more we create a hellish world,” wrote the Parisian philosopher—also a historian of cybernetics—Jean-Pierre Dupuy.
I take “hell” in its theological sense, i.e., a place which is void of grace—the undeserved, unnecessary, surprising, unforeseen. A paradox is at work here: ours is a world about which we pretend to have more and more information but which seems to us increasingly devoid of meaning.♦
That hellish world, devoid of grace—has it arrived? A world of information glut and gluttony; of bent mirrors and counterfeit texts; scurrilous blogs, anonymous bigotry, banal messaging. Incessant chatter. The false driving out the true.
That is not the world I see.
It was once thought that a perfect language should have an exact one-to-one correspondence between words and their meanings. There should be no ambiguity, no vagueness, no confusion. Our earthly Babel is a falling off from the lost speech of Eden: a catastrophe and a punishment. “I imagine,” writes the novelist Dexter Palmer, “that the entries of the dictionary that lies on the desk in God’s study must have one-to-one correspondences between the words and their definitions, so that when God sends directives to his angels, they are completely free from ambiguity. Each sentence that He speaks or writes must be perfect, and therefore a miracle.”♦ We know better now. With or without God, there is no perfect language.
Leibniz thought that if natural language could not be perfect, at least the calculus could: a language of symbols rigorously assigned. “All human thoughts might be entirely resolvable into a small number of thoughts considered as primitive.”♦ These could then be combined and dissected mechanically, as it were. “Once this had been done, whoever uses such characters would either never make an error, or, at least, would have the possibility of immediately recognizing his mistakes, by using the simplest of tests.” Gödel ended that dream.
On the contrary, the idea of perfection is contrary to the nature of language. Information theory has helped us understand that—or, if you are a pessimist, forced us to understand it. “We are forced to see,” Palmer continues,
that words are not themselves ideas, but merely strings of ink marks; we see that sounds are nothing more than waves. In a modern age without an Author looking down on us from heaven, language is not a thing of definite certainty, but infinite possibility; without the comforting illusion of meaningful order we have no choice but to stare into the face of meaningless disorder; without the feeling that meaning can be certain, we find ourselves overwhelmed by all the things that words might mean.
Infinite possibility is good, not bad. Meaningless disorder is to be challenged, not feared. Language maps a boundless world of objects and sensations and combinations onto a finite space. The world changes, always mixing the static with the ephemeral, and we know that language changes, not just from edition to edition of the Oxford English Dictionary but from one moment to the next, and from one person to the next. Everyone’s language is different. We can be overwhelmed or we can be emboldened.
More and more, the lexicon is in the network now—preserved, even as it changes; accessible and searchable. Likewise, human knowledge soaks into the network, into the cloud. The web sites, the blogs, the search engines and encyclopedias, the analysts of urban legends