The Information (90 page)
♦
“AS I SEE IT … MANKIND IS FACED WITH NOTHING SHORT OF”
: Carl Bridenbaugh, “The Great Mutation,” 326.
♦
“THIS IS A MISREADING OF THE PREDICAMENT”
: Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, “Clio and Chronos,” 39.
♦
“I HEAR NEW NEWS EVERY DAY”
: Robert Burton,
The Anatomy of Melancholy
, ed. Floyd Dell and Paul Jordan-Smith (New York: Tudor, 1927), 14.
♦
“TO WHICH RESULT THAT HORRIBLE MASS OF BOOKS”
: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz,
Leibniz Selections
, ed. Philip P. Wiener (New York: Scribner’s, 1951), 29; cf. Marshall McLuhan,
The Gutenberg Galaxy
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962), 254.
♦
“THOSE DAYS, WHEN (AFTER PROVIDENCE”
: Alexander Pope,
The Dunciad
(1729) (London: Methuen, 1943), 41.
♦
“KNOWLEDGE OF SPEECH, BUT NOT OF SILENCE”
: T. S. Eliot, “The Rock,” in
Collected Poems: 1909–1962
(New York: Harcourt Brace, 1963), 147.
♦
“THE TSUNAMI OF AVAILABLE FACT”
: David Foster Wallace, Introduction to
The Best American Essays 2007
(New York: Mariner, 2007).
♦
“UNFORTUNATELY, ‘INFORMATION RETRIEVING,’ HOWEVER SWIFT”
: Lewis Mumford,
The Myth of the Machine
, vol. 2,
The Pentagon of Power
(New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1970), 182.
♦
“ELECTRONIC MAIL SYSTEM”
: Jacob Palme, “You Have 134 Unread Mail! Do You Want to Read Them Now?” in
Computer-Based Message Services
, ed. Hugh T. Smith (North Holland: Elsevier, 1984), 175–76.
♦
A PAIR OF PSYCHOLOGISTS
: C. J. Bartlett and Calvin G. Green, “Clinical Prediction: Does One Sometimes Know Too Much,”
Journal of Counseling Psychology
13, no. 3 (1966): 267–70.
♦
“THE INFORMATION YOU ARE RECEIVING IS PREPARED FOR YOU”
: Siegfried Streufert et al., “Conceptual Structure, Information Search, and Information Utilization,”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
2, no. 5 (1965): 736–40.
♦
“INFORMATION-LOAD PARADIGM”
: For example, Naresh K. Malhotra, “Information Load and Consumer Decision Making,”
Journal of Consumer Research
8 (March 1982): 419.
♦
“E-MAIL, MEETINGS, LISTSERVS, AND IN-BASKET PAPER PILES”
: Tonyia J. Tidline, “The Mythology of Information Overload,”
Library Trends
47, no. 3 (Winter 1999): 502.
♦
“WE PAY TO HAVE NEWSPAPERS DELIVERED”
: Charles H. Bennett, “Demons, Engines, and the Second Law,”
Scientific American
257, no. 5 (1987): 116.
♦
“AS THE DESIRED INFORMATION”
: G. Bernard Shaw to the Editor,
Whitaker’s Almanack
, 31 May 1943.
♦
“DON’T ASK BY TELEPHONE FOR WORLD’S SERIES SCORES”
:
The New York Times
, 8 October 1929, 1.
♦
“YOU HUNCH LIKE A PIANIST”
: Anthony Lane, “Byte Verse,”
The New Yorker
, 20 February 1995, 108.
♦
“THE OBVIOUS COUNTERHYPOTHESIS ARISES”
: Daniel C. Dennett, “Memes and the Exploitation of Imagination,”
Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
48 (1990): 132.
♦
“TAKE THE LIBRARY OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM”
: Augustus De Morgan,
Arithmetical Books: From the Invention of Printing to the Present Time
(London: Taylor & Walton, 1847), ix.
♦
“THE MULTITUDE OF BOOKS, THE SHORTNESS OF TIME”
: Vincent of Beauvais, Prologue,
Speculum Maius
, quoted in Ann Blair, “Reading Strategies for Coping with Information Overload ca. 1550–1700,”
Journal of the History of Ideas
64, no. 1 (2003): 12.
♦
“THE PERCEPTION OF AN OVERABUNDANCE”
: Ibid.
♦
“DRIVEN BY THE NEED TO MASTER THE INFORMATION OVERLOAD”
: Brian W. Ogilvie, “The Many Books of Nature: Renaissance Naturalists and Information Overload,”
Journal of the History of Ideas
64, no. 1 (2003): 40.
♦
“A MAN WHO HAS SOMETHING TO SAY”
: Bertolt Brecht,
Radio Theory
(1927), quoted in Kathleen Woodward,
The Myths of Information: Technology and Postindustrial Culture
(Madison, Wisc.: Coda Press, 1980).
♦
“IT WAS INEVITABLE THAT MEANING”
: Jean-Pierre Dupuy,
The Mechanization of the Mind: On the Origins of Cognitive Science
, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), 119.
♦
“WE ARE TODAY AS FAR INTO THE ELECTRIC AGE”
: Marshall McLuhan,
The Gutenberg Galaxy
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962), 1.
♦
“TODAY … WE HAVE EXTENDED OUR CENTRAL NERVOUS SYSTEMS”
: Marshall McLuhan,
Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965), 3.
♦
“WHAT WHISPERS ARE THESE”
: Walt Whitman, “Years of the Modern,”
Leaves of Grass
(Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1919), 272.
♦
THEOLOGIANS BEGAN SPEAKING OF A SHARED MIND
: For example, “Two beings, or two millions—any number thus placed ‘in communication’—all possess one mind.” Parley Parker Pratt,
Key to the Science of Theology
(1855), quoted in John Durham Peters,
Speaking Into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 275.
♦
“IT BECOMES ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY”
: “… this amounts to imagining, above the animal biosphere and continuing it, a human sphere, the sphere of reflection, of conscious and free invention, of thought strictly speaking, in short, the sphere of mind or noosphere.” Édouard Le Roy,
Les Origines humaines et l’évolution de l’intelligence
(Paris: Boivin et Cie, 1928), quoted and translated by M. J. Aronson,
Journal of Philosophy
27, no. 18 (28 August 1930): 499.
♦
“DOES IT NOT SEEM AS THOUGH A GREAT BODY”
: Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,
The Human Phenomenon
, trans. Sarah Appleton-Weber (Brighton, U.K.: Sussex Academic Press, 1999), 174.
♦
“NONSENSE, TRICKED OUT”
:
Mind
70, no. 277 (1961): 99. Medawar did not much like Teilhard’s prose, either: “that tipsy, euphoric prose-poetry which is one of the more tiresome manifestations of the French spirit.”
♦
WRITERS OF SCIENCE FICTION
: Perhaps first and most notably Olaf Stapledon,
Last and First Men
(London: Methuen, 1930).
♦
“OUR MULTITUDE OF UNCO-ORDINATED GANGLIA”
: H. G. Wells,
World Brain
(London: Methuen, 1938), xiv.
♦
“IN A FEW SCORE YEARS”
: Ibid., 56.
♦
“SORT OF CEREBRUM FOR HUMANITY”
: Ibid., 63.
♦
“A NETWORK OF MARVELLOUSLY GNARLED AND TWISTED STEMS”
: H. G. Wells,
The Passionate Friends
(London: Harper, 1913), 332; H. G. Wells,
The War in the Air
(New York: Macmillan, 1922), 14.
♦
“IT’S NOT IN THE BEEPS”
: Quoted in Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman,
Dark Hero of the Information Age: In Search of Norbert Wiener, the Father of Cybernetics
(New York: Basic Books, 2005), 189.
♦
“I KNOW AN UNCOUTH REGION”
: Jorge Luis Borges, “The Library of Babel,”
Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings
(New York: New Directions, 1962), 54.
♦
“BEAUTY IS IN THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER”
: Fred I. Dretske,
Knowledge and the Flow of Information
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981), vii.
♦
“I TAKE ‘HELL’ IN ITS THEOLOGICAL SENSE”
: Jean-Pierre Dupuy, “Myths of the Informational Society,” in Kathleen Woodward,
The Myths of Information
:
Technology and Postindustrial Culture
(Madison, Wisc.: Coda Press, 1980), 3.
♦
“I IMAGINE … THAT THE ENTRIES OF THE DICTIONARY”
: Dexter Palmer,
The Dream of Perpetual Motion
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2010), 220.
♦
“ALL HUMAN THOUGHTS MIGHT BE ENTIRELY RESOLVABLE”
: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz,
De scientia universali seu calculo philosophico
, 1875; cf. Umberto Eco,
The Search for the Perfect Language
, trans. James Fentress (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1995), 281.
♦
“IS IT SIGNALING, LIKE TELEGRAPHS?”
: Margaret Atwood, “Atwood in the Twittersphere,”
The New York Review of Books
blog,
http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2010/mar/29/atwood-in-the-twittersphere/
, 29 March 2010.
♦
“GO MAD IN HERDS”
: Charles Mackay,
Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions
(Philadelphia: Lindsay & Blakiston, 1850), 14.
♦
BROWSE SU[BJECT] CENSORSHIP
: Nicholson Baker, “Discards” (1994), in
The Size of Thoughts: Essays and Other Lumber
(New York: Random House, 1996), 168.
♦
“WE HAVE A LEXICON OF THE CURRENT LANGUAGE”
: Interview, Allan Jennings, February 1996; James Gleick, “Here Comes the Spider,” in
What Just Happened: A Chronicle from the Information Frontier
(New York: Pantheon, 2002), 128–32.
♦
“I READ SOMEWHERE THAT EVERYBODY ON THIS PLANET”
: John Guare,
Six Degrees of Separation
(New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1990), 45.
♦
THE IDEA CAN BE TRACED BACK
: Albert-László Barabási,
Linked
(New York: Plume, 2003), 26 ff.
♦
WHAT WATTS AND STROGATZ DISCOVERED
: Duncan J. Watts and Steven H. Strogatz, “Collective Dynamics of ‘Small-World’ Networks,”
Nature
393 (1998): 440–42; also Duncan J. Watts,
Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age
(New York: Norton, 2003); Albert-László Barabási,
Linked
.
♦
“INFECTIOUS DISEASES ARE PREDICTED”
: Duncan J. Watts and Steven H. Strogatz, “Collective Dynamics of ‘Small-World’ Networks,” 442.
♦
“WE WANT THE DEMON, YOU SEE”
: Stanislaw Lem,
The Cyberiad
, trans. Michael Kandel (London: Secker & Warburg, 1975), 155.
♦
“WHEN IT WAS PROCLAIMED”
: Jorge Luis Borges, “The Library of Babel,”
Labyrinths
, 54.
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