In response to James Gleick’s "The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood"

In response to James Gleick’s The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

In James Gleick’s whirlwind tour of information theory, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood (2011), he states that “We have made many towers of Babel.” This sentence seems to present us with a double meaning. Having occurred after a list of the disambiguation links for the term “Babel” in Wikipedia, the “We have made many towers of Babel,” is a statement denoting the number of objects listed with the name “Babel.” On another level, the sentence could be a descriptive statement about the entirety of his book and the long history of information and technology in general. This short and poignant biblical story, no longer than ten or so lines, describes a uniting of all the disparate people groups of the world into a single language that renders communication effortless and using the newest form of architectural technology: bricks, they attempt to build a tower to the heavens. This could be interpreted as an attempt to build towards the highest ideal for mankind or an attempt at meaning-making. God rewarded their hubris with a confounding of their language. But it didn’t have to be God who obstructed their great project, because language itself has proven to be of such an unruly character. We are still building our technological “towers of Babel” and humanity remains confounded in the process. Gleick states “Wikipedia evolves dendritically, sending off new shoots in many directions. (In this it resembles the universe.)(Gleick, 2011)” Discreetly hidden among a description of the transmogrification of the Wikipedia site, which had proved to be an unprecedented source of information for its transmission and utility, this phrase, on a number of levels, seems to encapsulate the evolution of our relationship to information and the many twists and turns, angles and blind spots that this story takes. The analogy of the dendrite is also an apt description of two of the most complex and mysterious systems of information known to man: the telescopic images of the cosmic networks of galaxies and the microscopic, weblike network of neurons in the human brain. The universe of entangled facts to be “searched and processed” for meaning is the way we view the objective world. With every bit of information integrated, we form new understandings, and our knowledge branches out into ever new directions.

Each of us perceives this process differently, which naturally informs our perceptions in different ways and perpetuates an ideological struggle where language breaks down. The closer we examine the properties of the strangest and smallest particles of life, the more questions that seem to open up and the more our language is transformed and individuated. Each innovation in information processing was met with anxiety and confusion. Plato felt unease at the seeming transfer of the meaning of a message from the mind to a physical object, and on the obverse, a public, newly acquainted with the utility of a telegraphic system, would become perplexed that the message was, in fact, not bound to the physical object. The medium, in some kind of sleight of hand, seems to take center stage, while the meaning of a message becomes out of focus.

Plato had criticized the development of literacy for its perceived insincerity, he predicted the use of these external reminders would lull the masses into lazy mental fatigue, dependent on writing rather than memory. The written word, in disconnecting the thoughts from the thinker, evinced a detachment of the information from the source. This was disconcerting. In similar, though less critical fashion the sudden popularity of the telegraph forced a none-the-wiser public to comprehend a “message” divorced from its written, physical form. Few can imagine the meaning of a message free from its medium. Though his comments went unheeded, Plato’s concerns resurface today in our technologically advanced age in terms of technology’s capacity to inhibit critical thinking.

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