Data deluge

Partway through The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood, author James Gleick describes a technological innovation so transformative that it was heralded as "one of the grand way-marks in the onward and upward march of the human intellect" by the New York Times.

"What was the essence of the achievement?" Gleick asks. "‘The transmission of thought, the vital impulse of matter.' The excitement was global but the effects were local. ... Information that just two years earlier had taken days to arrive at its destination could now be there — anywhere — in seconds.

This was not a doubling or tripling of transmission speed; it was a leap of many orders of magnitude. It was like the bursting of a dam whose presence had not even been known." Sound familiar? It should.

The telegraph, after all, changed everything when it was popularised in the 1840s; by 1858, a transatlantic cable had put Britain's queen Victoria and president James Buchanan in direct contact, while news, gossip and commercial orders blazed across the wires.

"Some worried that the telegraph would be the death of newspapers," Gleick writes, although "newspapers could not wait to put the technology to work". All of a sudden, information was not just a tool but also a commodity.

"Because the telegraph was an information technology," he posits, "it served as an agent of its own ascendency." The story of the telegraph is central to The Information, which is a wide-ranging, deeply researched and delightfully engaging history — going back to Homer and Socrates (who distrusted written language as a corruption of pure memory) and extending, in loosely chronological fashion, to our contemporary culture of downloads and data clouds — of how we have come to occupy a world defined in bits and bytes.

For Gleick, information has always been our medium; since cave dwellers painted the first animal forms on their walls, we have existed in two parallel universes, the biosphere and the infosphere. "We are the species," he observes, "that named itself Homo sapiens, the one who knows — and then, after reflection, amended that to Homo sapiens sapiens." Our self-consciousness, in other words — our awareness of our awareness — resides at the heart of our incessant need to process and to know.

Unending transformations

Over the course of human culture, there have been a number of significant transformations, beginning with the alphabet, which Gleick calls "a founding technology of information.

The telephone, the fax machine, the calculator, and, ultimately, the computer are only the latest innovations devised for saving, manipulating and communicating knowledge." It is his idea that all these technologies exist as part of a continuum, with each developing from the last.

The key to such an argument is perspective, which is often in short supply when it comes to the information culture, with its tendency to inspire either paeans or jeremiads. Gleick, however, is too smart for that.

Throughout his career he has addressed difficult concepts accessibly but with an abiding sense of their complexity; his 1987 breakthrough work Chaos: Making a New Science (a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award) helped popularise chaos theory, while his 1992 biography Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman brought attention to the physicist and his work.

That is true also of The Information, which invokes both chaos theory and Feynman, and a dizzying array of other subjects, including African talking drums, the Jorge Luis Borges story The Library of Babel, Charles Babbage's Difference Engine (and the embrace of paradox in Austrian mathematician Kurt Godel's 1931 Incompleteness Theorem).

In places, the science can be overwhelming. The density, however, is unavoidable if we want to understand Claude Shannon's thinking, or why Gleick frames him as an essential figure in The Information, a Bell Labs researcher and the first person to theorise the bit as a "unit for measuring information ... as though there were such a thing, measurable and quantifiable, as information".

Towards the end of the book, he recalls the great library of Alexandria, which, beginning in the 3rd century BC, "maintained the greatest collection of knowledge on earth, then and for centuries to come".

Among its hundreds of thousands of scrolls, Gleick tells us, were "the dramas of Sophocles, Aeschylus, and Euripides; the mathematics of Euclid, Archimedes, and Eratosthenes; poetry, medical texts, star charts. ... And then it burned." The point, of course, is that everything is perishable, that the universe itself is erasable — except that it is not.

"All the lost plays of the Athenians!" he declares, citing a line from Tom Stoppard's play Arcadia. "How can we sleep for grief?" The answer is simple: "By counting our stock." This, Gleick concludes, is the rule of the universe, and of the library.

"The library will endure," he writes; "it is the universe. ... We walk the corridors, searching the shelves and rearranging them, looking for lines of meaning amid leagues of cacophony and incoherence" — just as we have always done.