The Information (78 page)

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.”
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The calculus always changes. Ask bloggers and tweeters: Which is worse, too many mouths or too many ears?

It was inevitable that meaning would force its way back in.

—Jean-Pierre Dupuy (2000)
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THE EXHAUSTION
, the surfeit, the pressure of information have all been seen before. Credit Marshall McLuhan for this insight—his most essential—in 1962:

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.”
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Walt Whitman had said it better a century before:

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.”
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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:

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.
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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 made for less than a penny per page, and librarians from Europe and the United States met to discuss the possibilities in Paris in 1937 for a World Congress of Universal Documentation. New ways of indexing the literature would be needed, they realized. The British Museum embarked on a program of microfilming four thousand of its oldest books. Wells made this prediction: “In a few score years there will be thousands of workers at this business of ordering and digesting knowledge where now you have one.”
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He admitted that he meant to be controversial and provocative. Attending the congress himself on behalf of England, he foresaw a “sort of cerebrum for humanity, a cerebral cortex which will constitute a memory and a perception of current reality for the whole human race.”
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Yet he was imagining something mundane, as well as utopian: an encyclopedia. It would be a successor to the great national encyclopedias—the French encyclopedia of Diderot, the
Britannica
, the German
Konversations-Lexikon
(he did not mention China’s
Four Great Books of Song
)—which had stabilized and equipped “the general intelligence.”

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.

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.”
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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.

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.”
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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.”
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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,

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.