The Information (76 page)
—Andrew Tobias (2007)
♦
AS THE PRINTING PRESS
, the telegraph, the typewriter, the telephone, the radio, the computer, and the Internet prospered, each in its turn, people said, as if for the first time, that a burden had been placed on human communication: new complexity, new detachment, and a frightening new excess. In 1962 the president of the American Historical Association, Carl Bridenbaugh, warned his colleagues that human existence was undergoing a “Great Mutation”—so sudden and so radical “that we are now suffering something like historical amnesia.”
♦
He lamented the decline of reading; the distancing from nature (which he blamed in part on “ugly yellow Kodak boxes” and “the transistor radio everywhere”); and the loss of shared culture. Most of all, for the preservers and recorders of the past, he worried about the new tools and techniques available to scholars: “that Bitch-goddess, Quantification”; “the data processing machines”; as well as “those frightening projected scanning devices, which we are told will read documents and books for us.”
More
was not
better
, he declared:
Notwithstanding the incessant chatter about communication that we hear daily, it has not improved; actually it has become more difficult.
♦
These remarks became well known in several iterations: first, the oral address, heard by about a thousand people in the ballroom of Conrad Hilton’s hotel in Chicago on the last Saturday evening on 1962;
♦
next, the printed version in the society’s journal in 1963; and then, a generation later, an online version, with its far greater reach and perhaps greater durability as well.
Elizabeth Eisenstein encountered the printed version in 1963, when she was teaching history as a part-time adjunct lecturer at American University in Washington (the best job she could get, as a woman with a Harvard Ph.D.). Later she identified that moment as the starting point of fifteen years of research that culminated in her landmark of scholarship, two volumes titled
The Printing Press as an Agent of Change
. Before Eisenstein’s work appeared in 1979, no one had attempted a comprehensive study of printing as the communications revolution essential to the transition from medieval times to modernity. Textbooks, as she noted, tended to slot the printing press somewhere between the Black Death and the discovery of America.
♦
She placed Gutenberg’s invention at center stage: the shift from script to print; the rise of printing shops in the cities of fifteenth-century Europe; the transformation in “data collection, storage and retrieval systems and communications networks.”
♦
She emphasized modestly that she would treat printing only as
an
agent of change, but she left readers convinced of its indispensable part in the transformations of early modern Europe: the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation, and the birth of science. It was “a decisive point of no return in human history.”
♦
It shaped the modern mind.
It shaped the minds of historians, too; she was interested in the unconscious mental habits of her profession. As she embarked on her project, she began to believe that scholars were too often blinded to the effects of
the very medium in which they swam. She gave credit to Marshall McLuhan, whose
Gutenberg Galaxy
had appeared in 1962, for forcing them to refocus their gaze. In the age of scribes, the culture had only primitive reckonings of chronology: muddled timelines counted the generations from Adam, or Noah, or Romulus and Remus. “Attitudes toward historical change,” she wrote, “will be found only occasionally in writings ostensibly devoted to ‘history’ and often have to be read into such writings. They must also be read into sagas and epics, sacred scriptures, funerary inscriptions, glyphs and ciphers, vast stone monuments, documents locked in chests in muniment rooms, and marginal notations on manuscript.”
♦
The sense of
when
we are—the ability to see the past spread out before one; the internalization of mental time charts; the appreciation of anachronism—came with the shift to print.
As a duplicating machine, the printing press not only made texts cheaper and more accessible; its real power was to make them stable. “Scribal culture,” Eisenstein wrote, was “constantly enfeebled by erosion, corruption, and loss.”
♦
Print was trustworthy, reliable, and permanent.
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When Tycho Brahe spent his countless hours poring over planetary and star tables, he could count on others checking the same tables, now and in the future. When Kepler computed his own far more accurate catalogue, he was leveraging the tables of logarithms published by Napier. Meanwhile, print shops were not only spreading Martin Luther’s theses but, more important, the Bible itself. The revolution of Protestantism hinged more on Bible reading than on any point of doctrine—print overcoming script; the codex supplanting the scroll; and the vernacular replacing the ancient languages. Before print, scripture was not truly fixed. All forms of knowledge achieved stability and permanence, not because paper was more durable than papyrus but simply because there were many copies.
In 1963, reading the warnings of the president of the American Historical Association, Eisenstein found herself agreeing that the profession faced a crisis, of sorts. But she felt Bridenbaugh had it exactly backward.
He thought the problem was forgetfulness: “As I see it,” he said dramatically, “mankind is faced with nothing short of the loss of its memory, and this memory is history.”
♦
Eisenstein, looking at the same new information technologies that so troubled older historians, drew the opposite lesson. The past is not receding from view but, on the contrary, becoming
more
accessible and
more
visible. “In an age that has seen the deciphering of Linear B and the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls,” she wrote, “there appears to be little reason to be concerned about ‘the loss of mankind’s memory.’ There are good reasons for being concerned about the overloading of its circuits.” As for the amnesia lamented by Bridenbaugh and so many of his colleagues:
This is a misreading of the predicament confronting historians today. It is not the onset of amnesia that accounts for present difficulties but a more complete recall than any prior generation has ever experienced. Steady recovery, not obliteration, accumulation, rather than loss, have led to the present impasse.
♦
From her point of view, a five-centuries-old communications revolution was still gathering momentum. How could they not see this?
“Overloading of circuits” was a fairly new metaphor to express a sensation—
too much information
—that felt new. It had always felt new. One hungers for books; rereads a cherished few; begs or borrows more; waits at the library door, and perhaps, in the blink of an eye, finds oneself in a state of surfeit:
too much to read
. In 1621 the Oxford scholar Robert Burton (who amassed one of the world’s largest private libraries, 1,700 books, but never a thesaurus) gave voice to the feeling:
I hear new news every day, and those ordinary rumours of war, plagues, fires, inundations, thefts, murders, massacres, meteors, comets, spectrums,
prodigies, apparitions, of towns taken, cities besieged in France, Germany, Turkey, Persia, Poland, &c. daily musters and preparations, and such like, which these tempestuous times afford, battles fought, so many men slain, monomachies, shipwrecks, piracies, and sea-fights, peace, leagues, stratagems, and fresh alarms. A vast confusion of vows, wishes, actions, edicts, petitions, lawsuits, pleas, laws, proclamations, complaints, grievances are daily brought to our ears. New books every day, pamphlets, currantoes, stories, whole catalogues of volumes of all sorts, new paradoxes, opinions, schisms, heresies, controversies in philosophy, religion, &c. Now come tidings of weddings, maskings, mummeries, entertainments, jubilees, embassies, tilts and tournaments, trophies, triumphs, revels, sports, plays: then again, as in a new shifted scene, treasons, cheating tricks, robberies, enormous villanies in all kinds, funerals, burials, deaths of Princes, new discoveries, expeditions; now comical then tragical matters. To-day we hear of new Lords and officers created, to-morrow of some great men deposed, and then again of fresh honours conferred; one is let loose, another imprisoned; one purchaseth, another breaketh: he thrives, his neighbour turns bankrupt; now plenty, then again dearth and famine; one runs, another rides, wrangles, laughs, weeps &c. Thus I daily hear, and such like.
♦
He thought information glut was new then. He was not complaining; just amazed. Protests followed soon enough, however. Leibniz feared a return to barbarism—“to which result that horrible mass of books which keeps on growing might contribute very much. For in the end the disorder will become nearly insurmountable.”
♦
Alexander Pope wrote satirically of “those days, when (after Providence had permitted the invention of Printing as a scourge for the sins of the learned) Paper also became so cheap, and printers so numerous, that a deluge of Authors covered the land.”
♦
Deluge
became a common metaphor for people describing information surfeit. There is a sensation of drowning: information as a rising, churning flood. Or it calls to mind bombardment, data impinging in a series of blows, from all sides, too fast. Fear of the cacophony of voices can
have a religious motivation, a worry about secular noise overwhelming the truth. T. S. Eliot expressed that in 1934:
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.
All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,
All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to GOD.
♦
Or one may dread the breaching of walls that stand before what is unfamiliar, or horrible, or terrifying. Or one may lose the ability to impose order on the chaos of sensations. The truth seems harder to find amid the multitude of plausible fictions.
After “information theory” came to be, so did “information overload,” “information glut,” “information anxiety,” and “information fatigue,” the last recognized by the
OED
in 2009 as a timely syndrome: “Apathy, indifference, or mental exhaustion arising from exposure to too much information, esp. (in later use) stress induced by the attempt to assimilate excessive amounts of information from the media, the Internet, or at work.” Sometimes information anxiety can coexist with boredom, a particularly confusing combination. David Foster Wallace had a more ominous name for this modern condition: Total Noise. “The tsunami of available fact, context, and perspective”
♦
—that, he wrote in 2007, constitutes Total Noise. He talked about the sensation of drowning and also of a loss of autonomy, of personal responsibility for being
informed
. To keep up with all the information we need proxies and subcontractors.
Another way to speak of the anxiety is in terms of the gap between information and knowledge. A barrage of data so often fails to tell us what we need to know. Knowledge, in turn, does not guarantee enlightenment or wisdom. (Eliot said that, too: “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? / Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”) It is an ancient observation, but one that seemed to bear restating when information became plentiful—particularly in a world where all bits are
created equal and information is divorced from meaning. The humanist and philosopher of technology Lewis Mumford, for example, restated it in 1970: “Unfortunately, ‘information retrieving,’ however swift, is no substitute for discovering by direct personal inspection knowledge whose very existence one had possibly never been aware of, and following it at one’s own pace through the further ramification of relevant literature.”
♦
He begged for a return to “moral self-discipline.” There is a whiff of nostalgia in this sort of warning, along with an undeniable truth: that in the pursuit of knowledge, slower can be better. Exploring the crowded stacks of musty libraries has its own rewards. Reading—even browsing—an old book can yield sustenance denied by a database search. Patience is a virtue, gluttony a sin.
Even in 1970, however, Mumford was not thinking about databases or any of the electronic technologies that loomed. He complained about “the multiplication of microfilms.” He also complained about too many books. Without “self-imposed restraints,” he warned, “the overproduction of books will bring about a state of intellectual enervation and depletion hardly to be distinguished from massive ignorance.” Restraints were not imposed. Titles continue to multiply. Books about information glut join the cornucopia; no irony is intended when the online bookseller Amazon.com transmits messages like “Start reading
Data Smog
on your Kindle in
under a minute
” and “Surprise me! See a random page in this book.”
The electronic communication technologies arrived so quickly, almost without warning. The word
e-mail
appeared in print (so far as the
OED
can determine) in 1982, in
Computerworld
magazine, which had barely heard reports: “ADR/Email is reportedly easy to use and features simple, English verbs and prompt screens.” Next year, the journal
Infosystems
declared, “Email promotes movement of information through space.” And the year after that—still a full decade before most people heard the word—a Swedish computer scientist named Jacob Palme at the QZ Computer Center in Stockholm issued a prescient warning—as simple, accurate, and thorough as any that followed in the next decades. Palme began:
