By naming the book 'The Information' rather than just 'Information', Gleick is raising an abstract, ubiquitous and banal concept into something far more important. It is a truism to say that we live in the Information Age. But now we live in the Age of The Information. Our whole lives and consciousnesses are steeped in an all-pervasive, inescapable field of information. But it turns out that Information may be even more fundamental than that. This book explores the development of Information - both as theory and history - and in doing so questions our notions of a material reality.
The sub-title of the book - 'A History, a Theory, a Flood' outlines the approach. Starting with a brief exposition of theory, he goes on to relate a history of information before returning to review just where we may be now - and, indeed, just what we may be now.
To start with then, it seems almost as if the history of civilisation since at least Plato has been a process of purification, the removal of extraneous ideas, superfluous matter to get down to the fundamentals. And the most fundamental of all fundamentals is Information. In the Prologue, Gleick suggests:
'...as scientists finally come to understand information, they wonder whether it may be primary: more fundamental than matter itself. They suggest that the bit is the irreducible kernel and that information forms the very core of existence. Bridging the physics of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, John Archibald Wheeler, the last surviving collaborator of both Einstein and Bohr, put this manifesto in oracular monosyllables: "It from Bit." Information gives rise to "every it - every particle, every field of force, even the spacetime continuum itself."' (P10)
This history of information starts, surprisingly, with African talking drums (which are fascinating) - not a code, but an unwritten, spoken, language. From there, we move to the defining moment when writing was invented. This allowed humanity to convert:
'...mentally, from a "prose of narrative" to a "prose of ideas"; organizing experience in terms of categories rather than events; embracing the discipline of abstraction...This was the discovery, not just of the self, but of the thinking self - in effect, the true beginning of consciousness.
In our world of ingrained literacy, thinking and writing seem scarcely related activities. We can imagine the latter depending on the former, but surely not the other way around: everyone thinks, whether or not they write. But [Eric] Havelock was right. The written word - the persistent word - was a prerequisite for conscious thought as we understand it. It was the trigger for a wholesale, irreversible change in the human psyche - psyche being the word favored by Socrates/Plato as they struggled to understand.' (P37)
We can only have history if we have writing. We can only have deductive reasoning and syllogisms if we have writing. There are no syllogisms in Homer specifically because Homer was passed down by word-of-mouth. Logic, deductive reasoning - all depend on writing. We have/we owe our consciousness (or, at least, its current form) in/to writing.
So this fundamental change, this codification and materialisation of thought, gave us the basis for thinking about 'information' and, really, for creating, communicating and contemplating it too.
From this point, Gleick goes on to outline a comprehensive history of 'information'. At times, it reads almost like a Foucaultian discourse but, as it gets nearer our present times, much of it may be familiar. From Charles Babbage, Morse Code to Alan Turing and on to Claude Shannon, Norbert Wiener and cybernetics (see Simon Singh's '
The Code Book' and Katherine Hailes ironically titled '
How We Became Posthuman' - both listed in the extensive bibliography) then to Dawkins' Memes, the appearance of maths in the biological sciences and, inevitably, to Kurt Gödel's 'incompleteness' theorem, we start to move back towards theory. But here, things start getting a little weird. To start with, we see the re-emergence of chaos. Gleick quotes Joseph Ford, a 'physicist studying the behaviour of unpredictable dynamical systems':
'"Chaotic orbits exist but they are Gödel's children, so complex, so overladen with information that humans can never comprehend them. But chaos is ubiquitous in nature; therefore the universe is filled with countless mysteries that man can never understand."'
To which Gleick adds: 'Yet one still tries to take their measure.' (P343-4)
Slowly, it seems that Gleick's concept of Information is becoming the ultimate in reification - an abstract concept that is taking on a physical presence. Gleick quotes Landauer (an exile from Nazi Germany working for IBM):
'Landauer devoted his career to establishing the physical basis of information. "Information Is Physical" was the title of one famous paper, meant to remind the community that computation requires physical objects and obeys the laws of physics...Whether a bit is a mark on a stone tablet or a hole in a punched card or a particle with spin up or down, he insisted that it could not exist without some embodiment.' (P361)
Yet a few pages later, Gleick is quoting from Borges' '
Library of Babel' and suggesting Wikipedia's Sisyphean task has an essentially Gödel-like eternal recursiveness as information grows, Gleick suggests, 'dendritically'.
So maybe, then, this reification is a two-way street. 'The Information' becomes the final, biggest reification where information and material reality become one and the same, as in Lewis Carroll's 1:1 scale map (P384). Are we finally heading for Kurtzweil's '
Singularity'? In some ways, this just seems like some kind of post-modernist manifesto:
'...a world where all bits are equal and information is divorced from meaning.' (P403-4)
In the end, Gleick draws back from this. In the Epilogue (The Return of Meaning), he says that the Infinite Library is now the universe but we are not phantoms in this universe; we are perhaps the librarians, cataloguing, categorising, searching for, and finding, meaning.