Book Review on The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood | SLA ...

Posted on 02 June 2011.

by Cynthia Lesky, Threshold Information Inc.

The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick (Pantheon, 2011): A review

What possible limits can there be when the subject is a history of Information?

The Information, James Gleick?s enlightening, exhilarating, and exhausting book, explores the boundless, inescapable ooze that permeates modern culture. Knowledge workers of all stripes will find something to reflect on in this panoramic survey.

Even the starting point?a definition of information?is complicated. If you are working in the knowledge industries, you already know this, even if you haven?t quite expressed it this way: information is an e-l-a-s-t-i-c word.? And in this book, science writer Gleick (previous books are Chaos and Genius), tackles information from both ends of the stretch: as signal and as meaning.

Information as signal is the concern of information theory, encompassing elements of math, physics, electricity and electronics. The fundamental language of information as signal is +/-, yes/no, on/off. More on this later.

In everyday speech, meaning may seem to be self-evident, but nevertheless, information professionals know that, in certain circumstances, a little clarification helps. So those of us who work in knowledge management, competitive intelligence, librarianship, etc. have learned to use words like content, intelligence, and knowledge to distinguish our kind of information.

Among the many anecdotes that Gleick tells is this one on the apparently age-old need to elaborate on information language. Four hundred years ago one Sir Thomas Elyot used the word intelligence to mean a concept a step higher up the value ladder from mere information: ?Nowe (intelligence is) used for an elegant worde, where there is mutuall treaties or appoyntementes, eyther by letters or message.? In the same way, some of us in the 21st century try to distinguish our own work from mere information by weaving the term that is perceived to be more elegant into our domains, as in market intelligence, competitive intelligence, business intelligence, etc.

The Information is structured as a historical review of the twin developments of information technology and information theory. ?Every new information technology transforms the nature of human thought.? From the advent of writing, through the printing press, telegraphy, telephony, and email, the way we receive and transmit information changes not only how we communicate, but also how we think and how we perceive the world. Each new technology changes our very culture.

Here?s a tiny indicator from 125 years ago that the adoption of the telegraph required a new way of thinking about communication:? A man sending a telegram, speaking to the telegraph operator and pointing to the piece of paper he brought with him into the telegraph office: ?If you sent my message, how come it?s still here on the hook?? The book is bursting with stories and examples from every era of history and pre-history: African drumming, printing, the telephone, the Enigma machine, the ENIAC, even inter-stellar communication.

A significant portion of the book is concerned with ?the information? as a signaling element, the on/off, yes/no, +/- of computer science and also of telegraphy, genetics, physics and math. There were a couple of chapters that had lots of occurrences of words like ?entropy? and ?quantum.? I confess that I trudged through these ? even skipped one ? but the difficulties of those passages were more than balanced by stories from the OED and Wikipedia, from the Great Library of Alexandria to the concept of memes.? (Richard Dawkins, who wrote The Selfish Gene, also came up with the idea of memes: ?Memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain.?) The worlds of Bell Labs and Claude Shannon (who invented the concept of bits as a measurement of information and whose ideas in the late ?30s resulted in modern information theory), code-buster Alan Turing, and mathematician Kurt G?del intertwine with Edgar Allan Poe, Lewis Carroll, and Louis Borges.

Margaret Mead and others (yes, she?s here too) wanted to call information theory ?signal theory,? because it troubled them that Shannon and his colleagues working at Bell Labs and MIT in the 30s, 40s and 50s were not focused on meaning. ?There were ?beep beep?s but that was all, not information. The moment one transforms that set of signals into other signals our brain can make an understanding of, then information is born?it?s not in the beeps.? (Librarians who have struggled with distinguishing themselves from IT departments might have had an easier time of it if their companies had Signal Technology instead of Information Technology departments.)

A few tough passages notwithstanding, the book more than held my interest. Towards the end, when the subtitle?s Flood came into focus, it became downright exciting as it addressed one of the themes of my own professional life: the management of too much information, especially information that is of questionable veracity.

Here is what I learned: information overload is not new nor is the fear of banality from hyper-speed dissemination of unedited content. The same stresses were felt and similar fears expressed by Plato (channeling Socrates who warned that writing would impoverish the soul nourished on an oral culture); in 1621 by Oxford scholar Robert Burton (regarding printed books); in the mid-19th century by poet Walt Whitman (regarding the telegraph); and by various writers from the 1960s onward. But in every era, as new technology opens the floodgates a little further, we adapt and develop tools and new ways of thinking to accommodate yet more of The Information ? the ?blood and the fuel? on which our world thrives. And so shall we.

Research analysts at Threshold Information, the company Cynthia Lesky founded in 1993, help companies harness external information to enable smart decisions and accelerate innovation. Products and services include industry intelligence news digests, decision-support research and analysis, custom journalism and an infinite variation on these themes. www.threshinfo.com cynthia.lesky@threshinfo.com

Source: http://illinois.sla.org/?p=1778

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