Glut - Mastering Information Through the Ages
by Alex Wright
You know the old saying, “don’t judge a book by the picture of the author on the inside back cover.” On the inside back cover of Glut, the author, Alex Wright looks down his spectacled nose at you with just the hint of a smirk in front of some obviously important building.
“I’m smarter than you", says Alex Wright.
I’ll probably never meet Mr. Wright, so we may never know what he is like in person, but fortunately his condescending portrait is no reflection on his book writing ability.
Glut chronicles and connects the story of information from pre-history to the present day. It starts with primordial bacteria and makes his way to Internet. When history is used well it leaves the reader wondering what will happen next, and Wright accomplishes that. This could have been a very dry book, but Wright keeps a shade of narrative going which keeps things interesting. He gives you just enough detail and leaves the book at a good length. As the story of Information unfolds, rather than giving you all the answers and analysis, he develops the ideas in the book in such a way that you arrive at your own some of your own conclusions. The book has some fun facts too, which you can use help you look like a pompous smarty pants, just like in his picture.
Two themes in the book caught my attention. One is the connection it traces from pre-history to the present with information technology and the other is the impact technology has had on the way we think.
Wright finds information systems in the natural world. The routing techniques of ants have been studied by HP and applied to IP packet routing in modern networking. That is one example of how “Information systems emerge whose intelligence ranks far below our own” (page 16). Certain groups of the same species of birds develop different behaviors and solutions for the same problems, developing a learned “culture,” an idea that only recently appears in modern science. Wright presents a concept of macro intelligence, a capacity for using and storing information that groups (social networks) have which transcends that of the individual.
Things get really interesting when he moves on to people. Early man and primitive societies developed information systems consisting of hierarchies and networks which in the core of how they work are similar to the modern systems that replaced them. A primary example is given in the taxonomy of plants and animals which bare a remarkable resemblance to those used by modern biologists.
The invention of written language is an obviously a huge advance in man’s ability to harness information. It emerged as a means to facilitate commerce. The earliest documents are receipts, inventories, and balance sheets. Literature owes a heavy debt to accounting. Writing became extremely complex, and created class of people who recorded and managed information for early civilization, the scribes. “Information Technologist may rank among the world’s oldest professions.” As a modern Information Technologist, I must admit I like that idea.
The invention and proliferation of writing moved man away from the oral tradition, and changes in the way we organize, store, and use information changed how we think. “The natural tendency of spoken thought…is toward fairly loose narration of events, metaphoric, fantasy, and storytelling. Fine grained analysis of the thought process is difficult because the memory trace of an oral narration is so ephemeral,” as Wright quotes Donald G. Davis. The technology we use changes what we can think about. It can have a huge multiplying effect on our group intelligence. Wright didn’t dismiss the oral tradition as inherently inferior. He maintained academic neutrality throughout the book, and was careful not to make value judgments.
Glut helped me articulate something that I have been thinking about modern electronic communication for a number of years. There is “a ‘new orality’ in the form of electronic communications” (page 65). Although I haven’t been as pessimistic about the impact the Internet is having on human thought and culture as the Luddite curmudgeon, Andrew Keen in his book, The Cult of the Amateur, I have long lamented what has seemed to be an erosion of the written language. Although email, instant messaging and blogging (I hate the word blog) all seem to be extensions of familiar old formats or writing, the tone is so much more conversational and informal it suggests “the casual rhythms of speech.” On a daily basis I read emails from important men, with no punctuation, no complete sentences, and no evidence that they’ve had any formal training in how to write the English language. I’ve worried that this is a symptom of a mind devoid of contemplation, the very thing for which a mind exists. You see it everywhere though, especially on the internet, even in journalism, you see the standards and formality slipping a little. My fear is that casual writing (even more casual than what you are reading now), will replace formal writing altogether.
There are some good stories about early attempts at Information contraptions which shared and nurtured the ambitions of the Internet. The involved big desks full of microfilm for the most part. I won’t try to paraphrase the entire book though. You can read it yourself. I leave you with some of the Fun Facts that I learned.
Fun Facts
The convention for bibliographic metadata is over 500 years old. The layout of a modern book typically follows a format that has been dominant since the early days of the printing press (page 114).
It took “the better part of 100 years for news Columbus’s ‘discovery’ of the New World to reach most people in Europe beyond a small circle of literate middle and upper class readers” (page 116).
“Printing and literacy seem to have spread in almost perfect lockstep with the rise of witch burning” (page 120).
Melville (Melvil) Dewey didn’t just invent that famous decimal system. He industrialized the library; “introducing interchangeable parts, establishing consistent standards, and normalizing variations” (page 174). Obsessed with efficiency, he changed his name from Melville to Melvil to eliminate extra letters. He once scolded his secretary for wishing him good morning.
Dewey “once scolded his secretary for wishing him good morning, admonishing her for such frivolous use of time that could otherwise have been spent doing work (page 174).
In 1883 Charles Cutter, Dewey’s rival in Library science, described “The Buffalo Public Library in 1983,” which foreshadowed many aspects of modern information technology. He saw libraries of the future connected telegraphically with “fonographic foil” (page 182).