The invention of the electric telegraph changed the speed at which information could be transmitted and there was a new sense of everyone around the world being interconnected. The New York Herald called it “a new species of consciousness”, while the New York Tribune described the landscape full of telegraph wires as “a net-work of nerves of iron wire, strung with lightning”. The parallels with the internet are many. “Some worried that the telegraph would be the death of newspapers,” James Gleick observes in this fascinating book, but “newspapers could not wait to put the new technology to work . . . The relationship between the telegraph and the newspaper was symbiotic.” Some newspapers even called themselves the Telegraph. But in time the telegraph would be eclipsed by the “electrical speaking telephone”. Nobody called their newspaper the Telephone.
The Information by James Gleick – review
How a costly toy came to transform our world
by Ian Pindar
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/apr/30/information-history-james-gleick-review
The invention of the electric telegraph changed the speed at which information could be transmitted and there was a new sense of everyone around the world being interconnected. The New York Herald called it “a new species of consciousness”, while the New York Tribune described the landscape full of telegraph wires as “a net-work of nerves of iron wire, strung with lightning”. The parallels with the internet are many. “Some worried that the telegraph would be the death of newspapers,” James Gleick observes in this fascinating book, but “newspapers could not wait to put the new technology to work . . . The relationship between the telegraph and the newspaper was symbiotic.” Some newspapers even called themselves the Telegraph. But in time the telegraph would be eclipsed by the “electrical speaking telephone”. Nobody called their newspaper the Telephone.
As Gleick reveals, each changing technology brings new ways of organising information, from libraries to phone books. One of the first machines for organising information was Charles Babbage’s “difference engine” – “a great, gleaming engine of brass and pewter, comprising thousands of cranks and rotors, cogs and gearwheels, all tooled with the utmost precision”. It was a colossal, expensive failure, financed by the Treasury and shut down by the prime minister, Robert Peel, in 1842. He called it a “costly toy”.
Gleick’s history of information really comes alive when he describes Babbage’s intellectual correspondence with the remarkable Augusta Ada Byron (the poet’s daughter). She understood better than Babbage did that his new invention, the “analytical engine”, was not a mere calculating machine but an “engine of information”. “It holds a position wholly its own,” she wrote. “We may say most aptly that the Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves.” She devised what would later be called algorithms, as well as proto-computer programs. “She was programming the machine,” Gleick says. “She programmed it in her mind, because the machine did not exist.”
It was not until after the second world war that “computing machines” became a reality, from the “30-ton monster” Eniac to IBM’s “giant calculating machine” Mark I, and in Britain the Colossus. “They are growing with fearful speed,” said Time. “Now they are beginning to act like genuine mechanical brains.” Even Norbert Wiener, the originator of cybernetics, raised the age-old fear that this new technology would in some way “devalue the human brain”. Working on MIT’s proto-computer, the “differential analyzer”, was a research assistant called Claude Shannon, the founding father of information theory. Part engineer, part mathematician, Shannon had a walk-on part in Gleick’s bestselling Chaos, but The Information is essentially constructed around Shannon and his discoveries.
Shannon first used the phrase “information theory” in a secret wartime paper on cryptography. “‘Information’ here,” he said, “although related to the everyday meaning of the word, should not be confused with it.” Shannon was interested in information without semantic content, without messy “psychological factors”. In his 1948 article “A Mathematical Theory of Communication”, Shannon coined the word “bit”, which led to John Archibald Wheeler’s catchphrase “It from Bit”, meaning that information gives rise to everything.
Information, it seems, is life itself, and Gleick shows how Shannon’s information theory not only led to computers and cyberspace, but also transformed biology into an information science concerned with messages, instructions and codes, where the gene is the information. “What lies at the heart of every living thing is not a fire, not warm breath, not a ‘spark of life,'” Richard Dawkins declared. “It is information, words, instructions.” Evolution itself can be viewed as an exchange of information between organism and environment. Gleick shows how information theory also breathed new life into psychology, leading to the emergence of cognitive science and the so-called “informational turn”, where the basic ingredient for building a mind is information.
Too much information – information overload – is the subject of the last third of Gleick’s book, where he quietly drops Shannon’s concept of information as a mathematical abstraction independent of meaning for the every-day meaning of the word. This final section, the “flood” part, is something of a letdown because it lacks political awareness. Information overload requires us to sort the information we receive, says Gleick, to “filter and search”, but filtering information, he lamely observes, raises issues “of trust and taste”. We may well live in an “information age”, but Gleick never asks who might be filtering the information before it reaches us. He regards “information poverty” as a problem solely for previous generations and not for viewers of, say, Fox News.
Here is a book about information that makes no mention of censorship (try searching for “Liu Xiaobo” or “Nobel peace prize” in China). Google’s “voracious data mining of trillions of words in more than 300 languages” excites him, but there is no sense that this multinational corporation might have become too powerful. No sense, in short, that information is power.
Telegraph Road
by Mark Knopfler
Dire Straits
A long time ago came a man on a track
Walking thirty miles with a pack on his back
And he put down his load where he thought it was the best
Made a home in the wilderness
He built a cabin and a winter store
And he ploughed up the ground by the cold lake shore
And the other travellers came riding down the track
And they never went further, no, they never went back
Then came the churches then came the schools
Then came the lawyers then came the rules
Then came the trains and the trucks with their loads
And the dirty old track was the telegraph road
Then came the mines – then came the ore
Then there was the hard times then there was a war
Telegraph sang a song about the world outside
Telegraph road got so deep and so wide
Like a rolling river. . .
And my radio says tonight it’s gonna freeze
People driving home from the factories
There’s six lanes of traffic
Three lanes moving slow. . .
I used to like to go to work but they shut it down
I got a right to go to work but there’s no work here to be found
Yes and they say we’re gonna have to pay what’s owed
We’re gonna have to reap from some seed that’s been sowed
And the birds up on the wires and the telegraph poles
They can always fly away from this rain and this cold
You can hear them singing out their telegraph code
All the way down the telegraph road
You know I’d sooner forget but I remember those nights
When life was just a bet on a race between the lights
You had your head on my shoulder you had your hand in my hair
Now you act a little colder like you don’t seem to care
But believe in me baby and I’ll take you away
From out of this darkness and into the day
From these rivers of headlights these rivers of rain
From the anger that lives on the streets with these names
‘cos I’ve run every red light on memory lane
I’ve seen desperation explode into flames
And I don’t want to see it again. . .
From all of these signs saying sorry but we’re closed
All the way down the telegraph road