The Information (5 page)

After publishing his book, John Carrington came across a mathematical way to understand this point. A paper by a Bell Labs telephone engineer, Ralph Hartley, even had a relevant-looking formula:
H
=
n
log
s
, where
H
is the amount of information,
n
is the number of symbols in the message, and
s
is the number of symbols available in the language.
^♦
Hartley’s younger colleague Claude Shannon later pursued this lead, and one of his touchstone projects became a precise measurement of the redundancy in English. Symbols could be words, phonemes, or dots and dashes. The degree of choice within a symbol set varied—a thousand words or forty-five phonemes or twenty-six letters or three types of interruption in an electrical circuit. The formula quantified a simple enough phenomenon (simple, anyway, once it was noticed): the fewer symbols available, the more of them must be transmitted to get across a given
amount of information. For the African drummers, messages need to be about eight times as long as their spoken equivalents.

Hartley took some pains to justify his use of the word
information
. “As commonly used, information is a very elastic term,” he wrote, “and it will first be necessary to set up for it a more specific meaning.” He proposed to think of information “physically”—his word—rather than psychologically. He found the complications multiplying. Somewhat paradoxically, the complexity arose from the intermediate layers of symbols: letters of the alphabet, or dots and dashes, which were discrete and therefore easily countable in themselves. Harder to measure were the connections between these stand-ins and the bottom layer: the human voice itself. It was this stream of meaningful sound that still seemed, to a telephone engineer as much as an African drummer, the real stuff of communication, even if the sound, in turn, served as a code for the knowledge or meaning below. In any case Hartley thought an engineer should be able to generalize over all cases of communication: writing and telegraph codes as well as the physical transmission of sound by means of electromagnetic waves along telephone wires or through the ether.

He knew nothing of the drums, of course. And no sooner did John Carrington come to understand them than they began to fade from the African scene. He saw Lokele youth practicing the drums less and less, schoolboys who did not even learn their own drum names.
^♦
He regretted it. He had made the talking drums a part of his own life. In 1954 a visitor from the United States found him running a mission school in the Congolese outpost of Yalemba.
^♦
Carrington still walked daily in the jungle, and when it was time for lunch his wife would summon him with a fast tattoo. She drummed: “White man spirit in forest come come to house of shingles high up above of white man spirit in forest. Woman with yams awaits. Come come.”

Before long, there were people for whom the path of communications technology had leapt directly from the talking drum to the mobile phone, skipping over the intermediate stages.

♦
The trip was sponsored by the Society for the Extinction of the Slave Trade and the Civilization of Africa for the purpose of interfering with slavers.

♦
“A very short experience, however, showed the superiority of the alphabetic mode,” he wrote later, “and the big leaves of the numbered dictionary, which cost me a world of labor,… were discarded and the alphabetic installed in its stead.”

♦
Operators soon distinguished spaces of different lengths—intercharacter and interword—so Morse code actually employed four signs.

Odysseus wept when he heard the poet sing of his great deeds abroad because, once sung, they were no longer his alone. They belonged to anyone who heard the song.

—Ward Just (2004)
^♦

“
TRY TO IMAGINE
,” proposed Walter J. Ong, Jesuit priest, philosopher, and cultural historian, “a culture where no one has ever ‘looked up’ anything.”
^♦
To subtract the technologies of information internalized over two millennia requires a leap of imagination backward into a forgotten past. The hardest technology to erase from our minds is the first of all: writing. This arises at the very dawn of history, as it must, because the history begins with the writing. The pastness of the past depends on it.
^♦

It takes a few thousand years for this mapping of language onto a system of signs to become second nature, and then there is no return to naïveté. Forgotten is the time when our very awareness of words came from
seeing
them. “In a primary oral culture,” as Ong noted,

In the 1960s and ’70s, Ong declared the electronic age to be a new age of orality—but of “secondary orality,” the spoken word amplified and
extended as never before, but always in the context of literacy: voices heard against a background of ubiquitous print. The first age of orality had lasted quite a bit longer. It covered almost the entire lifetime of the species, writing being a late development, general literacy being almost an afterthought. Like Marshall McLuhan, with whom he was often compared (“the other eminent Catholic-electronic prophet,”
^♦
said a scornful Frank Kermode), Ong had the misfortune to make his visionary assessments of a new age just before it actually arrived. The new media seemed to be radio, telephone, and television. But these were just the faint glimmerings in the night sky, signaling the light that still lay just beyond the horizon. Whether Ong would have seen cyberspace as fundamentally oral or literary, he would surely have recognized it as transformative: not just a revitalization of older forms, not just an amplification, but something wholly new. He might have sensed a coming discontinuity akin to the emergence of literacy itself. Few understood better than Ong just how profound a discontinuity that had been.

When he began his studies, “oral literature” was a common phrase. It is an oxymoron laced with anachronism; the words imply an all-too-unconscious approach to the past by way of the present. Oral literature was generally treated as a variant of writing; this, Ong said, was “rather like thinking of horses as automobiles without wheels.”
^♦

When it comes to understanding the preliterate past, we modern folk are hopelessly automobilized. The written word is the mechanism by
which we know what we know. It organizes our thought. We may wish to understand the rise of literacy both historically and logically, but history and logic are themselves the products of literate thought.

Writing, as a technology, requires premeditation and special art. Language is not a technology, no matter how well developed and efficacious. It is not best seen as something separate from the mind; it is what the mind does. “Language in fact bears the same relationship to the concept of mind that legislation bears to the concept of parliament,” says Jonathan Miller: “it is a competence forever bodying itself in a series of concrete performances.”
^♦
Much the same might be said of writing—it is concrete performance—but when the word is instantiated in paper or stone, it takes on a separate existence as artifice. It is a product of tools, and it is a tool. And like many technologies that followed, it thereby inspired immediate detractors.

One unlikely Luddite was also one of the first long-term beneficiaries. Plato (channeling the nonwriter Socrates) warned that this technology meant impoverishment:

External characters which are no part of themselves
—this was the trouble. The written word seemed insincere. Ersatz scratchings on papyrus or clay were far abstracted from the real, the free-flowing sound of language, intimately bound up with thought so as to seem coterminous with it. Writing appeared to draw knowledge away from the person, to place their memories in storage. It also separated the speaker from the listener, by so many miles or years. The deepest consequences of writing, for the individual and for the culture, could hardly have been foreseen,
but even Plato could see some of the power of this disconnection. The one speaks to the multitude. The dead speak to the living, the living to the unborn. As McLuhan said, “Two thousand years of manuscript culture lay ahead of the Western world when Plato made this observation.”
^♦
The power of this first artificial memory was incalculable: to restructure thought, to engender history. It is still incalculable, though one statistic gives a hint: whereas the total vocabulary of any oral language measures a few thousand words, the single language that has been written most widely, English, has a documented vocabulary of well over a million words, a corpus that grows by thousands of words a year. These words do not exist only in the present. Each word has a provenance and a history that melts into its present life.

With words we begin to leave traces behind us like breadcrumbs: memories in symbols for others to follow. Ants deploy their pheromones, trails of chemical information; Theseus unwound Ariadne’s thread. Now people leave paper trails. Writing comes into being to retain information across time and across space. Before writing, communication is evanescent and local; sounds carry a few yards and fade to oblivion. The evanescence of the spoken word went without saying. So fleeting was speech that the rare phenomenon of the echo, a sound heard once and then again, seemed a sort of magic. “This miraculous rebounding of the voice, the Greeks have a pretty name for, and call it Echo,”
^♦
wrote Pliny. “The spoken symbol,” as Samuel Butler observed, “perishes instantly without material trace, and if it lives at all does so only in the minds of those who heard it.” Butler was able to formulate this truth just as it was being falsified for the first time, at the end of the nineteenth century, by the arrival of the electric technologies for capturing speech. It was precisely because it was no longer completely true that it could be clearly seen. Butler completed the distinction: “The written symbol extends infinitely, as regards time and space, the range within which one mind can communicate with another; it gives the writer’s mind a life limited by the duration of ink, paper, and readers, as against that of his flesh and blood body.”
^♦

But the new channel does more than extend the previous channel. It enables reuse and “re-collection”—new modes. It permits whole new architectures of information. Among them are history, law, business, mathematics, and logic. Apart from their content, these categories represent new techniques. The power lies not just in the knowledge, preserved and passed forward, valuable as it is, but in the methodology: encoded visual indications, the act of transference, substituting signs for things. And then, later, signs for signs.

Paleolithic people began at least 30,000 years ago to scratch and paint shapes that recalled to the eye images of horses, fishes, and hunters. These signs in clay and on cave walls served purposes of art or magic, and historians are loath to call them writing, but they began the recording of mental states in external media. In another way, knots in cords and notches in sticks served as aids to memory. These could be carried as messages. Marks in pottery and masonry could signify ownership. Marks, images, pictographs, petroglyphs—as these forms grew stylized, conventional, and thus increasingly abstract, they approached what we understand as writing, but one more transition was crucial, from the representation of things to the representation of spoken language: that is, representation twice removed. There is a progression from pictographic,
writing the picture;
to ideographic,
writing the idea;
and then logographic,
writing the word
.

Chinese script began this transition between 4,500 and 8,000 years ago: signs that began as pictures came to represent meaningful units of sound. Because the basic unit was the word, thousands of distinct symbols were required. This is efficient in one way, inefficient in another. Chinese unifies an array of distinct spoken languages: people who cannot speak to one another can write to one another. It employs at least fifty thousand symbols, about six thousand commonly used and known to most literate Chinese. In swift diagrammatic strokes they encode multidimensional semantic relationships. One device is
simple repetition:
tree
+
tree
+
tree
=
forest;
more abstractly,
sun
+
moon
=
brightness
and
east
+
east
=
everywhere
. The process of compounding creates surprises:
grain
+
knife
=
profit; hand
+
eye
=
look
. Characters can be transformed in meaning by reorienting their elements:
child
to
childbirth
and
man
to
corpse
. Some elements are phonetic; some even punning. The entirety is the richest and most complex writing system that humanity has ever evolved. Considering scripts in terms of how many symbols are required and how much meaning each individual symbol conveys, Chinese thus became an extreme case: the largest set of symbols, and the most meaningful individually. Writing systems could take alternative paths: fewer symbols, each carrying less information. An intermediate stage is the syllabary, a phonetic writing system using individual characters to represent syllables, which may or may not be meaningful. A few hundred characters can serve a language.