The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood

"If Standage’s is a small book focused on a particular technology and moment in time, Gleick’s is extraordinarily broad and sweeping. It’s a very large book, in which he tries – and succeeds in many ways I think – to tell the story of information in human history. Information breaks down into two different things in essence. On the one hand it is messages – things with meaning to human beings – and on the other hand it is an abstract good without meaning which we have begun to industrialise, by which I mean figure out how to get more information across a distance more quickly and efficiently. The book begins with African talking drums, a very early form of technology that transmitted information further than was possible with the human voice. It goes from there through every major new technology, as well as every major mathematical discovery that related to the processing of information, all the way up to computers and the Internet. He even looks at other aspects of life and society that we’re beginning to think about in informational terms – quantum physics, our genetic structure and so on. It’s a history, but it’s also the story of our shifting views of information. The main character in the book is an American electronic engineer called Claude Shannon [known as the ‘father of information theory’]. He was the first to separate information from meaning. He realised that information takes the form of some kind of code. And because codes can be studied mathematically, you can use different algorithms and formulae to compress information and transmit it more quickly. That becomes, in the end, one of Gleick’s main thrusts – that information is no longer simply meaning, it has become a commodity. While the story that The Information tells is a celebration of human ingenuity, it also leaves you with the question of whether, by industrialising information, we may be sacrificing the richness of meaning and expression that can’t be measured in terms of efficiency and productivity. So the book ends on an ambivalent note. That’s right. One thing that Claude Shannon and other information scientists wanted to do was get rid of all the redundancy that’s inherent in human communication. But there’s a lot of good things in redundancy. Much of literature and art is all about redundancy, ambiguity and ambivalence. I certainly hope we won’t lose that as we think of language and communication as something that needs to be measured, and made more efficient. Well, if you look at how many scrolls there were in the library of Alexandria there were far too many for one individual to read. For millennia there has been more information than you could take in. So you could argue that we’ve been struggling with information overload for a long time. Two things have happened. One, we are constantly reminded that there is more information than we can take in, and two, the Internet exposes us to a constant flow of information that is of personal and immediate interest to us. That changes the nature of information overload from “I’m never going to have all the knowledge of the human race” to “I’m never going to read all these messages that relate to people I know, celebrities I follow, news stories that interest me”. Even at that level of the immediately intriguing and important, we can’t take all of it in. “Information overload may not be new, but the nature of it has changed.” I think that encourages this almost compulsive information gathering behaviour that many of us – myself included – fall prey to. And in order to take in as much as we can, we tend to shrink every piece of information. We quickly look across many headlines, email messages get shorter and shorter, then turn into texts and tweets. So information overload may not be new, but the nature of it has changed. I actually have a different view. I thought Clay Shirky’s talk was interesting, but I think that information overload has nothing to do with filter failure and everything to do with filter success. We have developed filters that are very good at bombarding us not with extraneous, uninteresting information but with information that is immediately pertinent to us. So I think we’re going to get more information overload with better filters, because there’s no limit to the information out there that is interesting to us."