The Information (77 page)

He had statistics from his local network: the average message took 2 minutes, 36 seconds to write and just 28 seconds to read. Which would have been fine, except that people could so easily send many copies of the same message.

When psychologists or sociologists try to study information overload with the methods of their disciplines, they get mixed results. As early as 1963, a pair of psychologists set out to quantify the effect of extra information on the process of clinical diagnosis.
^♦
As they expected, they found that “too much information”—not easy to define, they admitted—often contaminated judgment. They titled their paper “Does One Sometimes Know Too Much?” and somewhat gleefully listed alternative titles, as a bonus: “Never Have So Many Done So Little”; “Are You Getting More Now But Predicting It Less?”; and “Too Much Information Is a Dangerous Thing.” Others tried to measure the effects of information load on blood pressure, heart rhythms, and respiration rates.

One worker in the area was Siegfried Streufert, who reported in a series of papers in the 1960s that the relation between information load and information handling typically looked like an “inverted U”: more information was helpful at first, then not so helpful, and then actually harmful. One of his studies took 185 university students (all male) and had them pretend to be commanders making decisions in a tactical game. They were told:

No matter what they chose, their preferences were ignored. The experimenter, not the subjects, predetermined the amount of information. Streufert concluded from the data that “superoptimal” information loads caused poor performance, “yet it should be noted that even at highly superoptimal information loads (i.e., 25 messages per 30-minute period), the subjects are still asking for increased information levels.” Later, he used similar methodology to study the effects of drinking too much coffee.

By the 1980s, researchers were speaking confidently about the “information-load paradigm.”
^♦
This was a paradigm based on a truism: that people can only “absorb” or “process” a limited amount of information. Various investigators found surfeits causing not only confusion and frustration, but also blurred vision and dishonesty. Experiments themselves had a broad menu of information to process: measurements of memory span; ideas of channel capacity drawn from Shannon; and variations on the theme of signal-to-noise ratio. A common, if dubious, approach to research was direct introspection. One small project in 1998 took as a “community or folk group” graduate students in library and information science at the University of Illinois; all agreed, when asked, that they suffered from information overload, due to “e-mail, meetings, listservs, and in-basket paper piles.”
^♦
Most felt that a surfeit of
information tainted their leisure time as well as their work time. Some reported headaches. The tentative conclusion: information overload is real; also, it is both a “code phrase” and a myth. The research can only press onward.

Having to think of information as a burden is confusing, as Charles Bennett says. “We pay to have newspapers delivered, not taken away.”
^♦
But the thermodynamics of computation shows that yesterday’s newspaper takes up space that Maxwell’s demon needs for today’s work, and modern experience teaches the same. Forgetting used to be a failing, a waste, a sign of senility. Now it takes effort. It may be as important as remembering.

Facts were once dear; now they are cheap. Once, people would turn to the pages of
Whitaker’s Almanack
, published yearly in Britain, or the
World Almanac
, in the United States, to find the names and dates of monarchs and presidents, tables of holidays and high water, sizes and populations of faraway places, or the ships and chief officers of the navy. Lacking the almanac, or seeking an even more obscure fact, they might call on a man or woman of experience behind a desk at a public library. When George Bernard Shaw needed the whereabouts of the nearest crematorium—his wife was dying—he opened the almanac and was aggrieved. “I have just found an astonishing omission in Whitaker,” he wrote to the editor. “As the desired information is just what one goes to your invaluable almanack for, may I suggest that a list of the 58 crematoria now working in the country, and instructions what to do, would be a very desirable addition.”
^♦
His letter is poignant. He does not mention his wife—only “a case of serious illness”—and refers to himself as “the bereaved enquirer.” Shaw had a telegraph address and a telephone but took it for granted that facts were to be found in print.

For many, the telephone had already begun to extend the reach of the inquisitive. Twentieth-century people realized that they could know
instantly the scores of sporting events they had not witnessed; so many came up with the idea of telephoning the newspaper that
The New York Times
felt compelled to print a front-page notice in 1929 begging readers to desist: “Don’t Ask by Telephone for World’s Series Scores.”
^♦
Now the information, in “real time,” is considered a birthright.

What do you do when you have everything at last? Daniel Dennett imagined—in 1990, just before the Internet made this dream possible—that electronic networks could upend the economics of publishing poetry. Instead of slim books, elegant specialty items marketed to connoisseurs, what if poets could publish online, instantly reaching not hundreds but millions of readers, not for tens of dollars but for fractions of pennies? That same year, Sir Charles Chadwyck-Healey, a publisher, conceived of the English Poetry Full-Text Database as he walked one day through the British Library, and four years later he had produced it—not the present or future of poetry, but the past, and not, at first, online but in four compact discs, 165,000 poems by 1,250 poets spanning thirteen centuries, priced at $51,000. Readers and critics had to figure out what to make of this. Not
read
it, surely, the way they would read a book. Read
in
it, perhaps. Search it, for a word or an epigraph or a fragment half remembered.

Anthony Lane, reviewing the database for
The New Yorker
, found himself swinging from elation to dismay and back. “You hunch like a pianist over the keys,” he wrote, “knowing what awaits you, thinking, Ah, the untold wealth of English literature! What hidden jewels I shall excavate from the deepest mines of human fancy!”
^♦
Then come the macaronics, the clunkers, the flood of bombast and mediocrity. The sheer unordered mass begins to wear you down. Not that Lane sounds at all weary. “What a steaming
heap
,” he cries, and he revels in it. “Never have I beheld such a magnificent tribute to the powers of human incompetence—and also, by the same token, to the blessings of human forgetfulness.” Where else would he have found the utterly forgotten Thomas Freeman (not in Wikipedia) and this lovely self-referential couplet:

The CD-ROMs are already obsolete. All English poetry is in the network now—or if not all, some approximation thereof, and if not now, then soon.

The past folds accordion-like into the present. Different media have different event horizons—for the written word, three millennia; for recorded sound, a century and a half—and within their time frames the old becomes as accessible as the new. Yellowed newspapers come back to life. Under headings of
50 Years Ago
and
100 Years Ago
, veteran publications recycle their archives: recipes, card-play techniques, science, gossip, once out of print and now ready for use. Record companies rummage through their attics to release, or re-release, every scrap of music, rarities, B-sides, and bootlegs. For a certain time, collectors, scholars, or fans
possessed
their books and their records. There was a line between what they had and what they did not. For some, the music they owned (or the books, or the videos) became part of who they were. That line fades away. Most of Sophocles’ plays are lost, but those that survive are available at the touch of a button. Most of Bach’s music was unknown to Beethoven; we have it all—partitas, cantatas, and ringtones. It comes to us instantly, or at light speed. It is a symptom of omniscience. It is what the critic Alex Ross calls the Infinite Playlist, and he sees how mixed is the blessing: “anxiety in place of fulfillment, an addictive cycle of craving and malaise. No sooner has one experience begun than the thought of what else is out there intrudes.” The embarrassment of riches. Another reminder that information is not knowledge, and knowledge is not wisdom.

Strategies emerge for coping. There are many, but in essence they all boil down to two: filter and search. The harassed consumer of information turns to filters to separate the metal from the dross; filters include
blogs and aggregators—the choice raises issues of trust and taste. The need for filters intrudes on any thought experiment about the wonders of abundant information. When Dennett imagined his Complete Poetry Network, he saw the problem. “The obvious counterhypothesis arises from population memetics,”
^♦
he said. “If such a network were established, no poetry lover would be willing to wade through thousands of electronic files filled with doggerel, looking for good poems.” Filters would be needed—editors and critics. “They flourish because of the short supply and limited capacity of minds, whatever the transmission media between minds.” When information is cheap, attention becomes expensive.

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.”
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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.