The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

by James Gleick

a drummer would invariably add “a little phrase” to each short word.

“the moon looks down at t...

The extra drumbeats, far from being extraneous, provide context.

Every ambiguous word begins in a cloud of possible alternative interpretations; then the unwanted possibilities evaporate.

but in effect they “hear” the missing consonants and vowels, too.

For that matter, they hear whole phrases, not individual words.

The drum language is creative,

The resemblance to Homeric formulas—not merely Zeus, but Zeus the cloud-gatherer;

In an oral culture, inspiration has to serve clarity and memory first.

Redundancy—inefficient by definition—serves as the antidote to confusion. It provides second chances. Every natural language has redundancy built in; this is why people can understand text riddled with errors and why they can understand conversation in a noisy room.

The natural redundancy of English motivates the famous New York City subway poster of the 1970s (and the poem by James Merrill), if u cn rd ths u cn gt a gd jb w hi pa! (“This counterspell may save your soul,” Merrill adds.)

For a telegraphist it is an expensive waste. For an African drum...

The extra syllables perform the same function as the extra verbosity of the talking drums.

H = n log s

where H is the amount of information, n is the number of symbols in the message, and s is the number of symbols available in the language.

Hartley’s younger colleague Claude Shannon later p...

one of his touchstone projects became a precise measurement of the r...

The degree of choice within a symbol set varied—a thousand words or forty-five phonemes or twenty-six letters or three types of i...

For the African drummers, messages need to be about eight times as long as their spoken equivalents.

no

sooner did John Carrington come to understand them than they began to fade from the African scene.

Before long, there were people for whom the path of communications technology had leapt directly from the talking drum to the mobile phone, skipping over the intermediate stages.

Operators soon distinguished spaces of different lengths—intercharacter and interword—so Morse code actually employed four signs.

Odysseus wept when he heard the poet sing of his great deeds abroad because, once sung, they were no longer his alone. They belonged to anyone who heard the song. —Ward Just (2004)

The hardest technology to erase from our minds is the first of all: writing.

It takes a few thousand years for this mapping of language onto a system of signs to become second nature, and then there is no return to naïveté.

Ong had the misfortune to make his visionary assessments of a new age just before it actually arrived.

The new media seemed to be radio, telephone, and television.

But these were just the faint glimmerings in the night sky, signaling the light that still l...

not just an amplification, but something wholly new.

In the end, horses are only what they are not.

When it comes to understanding the preliterate past, we modern folk are hopelessly automobilized.

Language is not a technology, no matter how well developed and efficacious. It is not best seen as something separate from the mind; it is what the mind does.

Plato (channeling the nonwriter Socrates) warned that this technology meant impoverishment:

For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory.

You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding;

the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom.

The written word seemed insincere.

Ersatz scratchings on papyrus or clay were far abstracted from the real,

McLuhan said, “Two thousand years of manuscript culture lay ahead of the Western world when Plato made this observation.”

The power of this first artificial memory was incalculable: to restructure thought, to engender history.

whereas the total vocabulary of any oral language measures a few thousand words, the single language that has been written most widely, English, has a documented vocabulary of well over a million words, a corpus that grows by thousands of words a year. These words do not exist only in the prese...

Before writing, communication is evanescent and local; sounds carry a few yards and fade to oblivion.

So fleeting was speech that the rare phenomenon of the echo, a sound heard once and then again, seemed a sort of magic.

“The spoken symbol,” as Samuel Butler observed, “perishes instantly without material trace, and if it lives at all does so only in the minds of those who heard it.”

“The written symbol extends infinitely, as regards time and space, the range within which one mind can communicate with another; it gives the writer’s mind a life limited by the duration of ink, paper, and readers, as against that of his flesh and blood body.”

Paleolithic people began at least 30,000 years ago to scratch and paint shapes that recalled to the eye images of horses, fishes, and hunters.

These signs in clay and on cave walls served purposes of art or magic, and historians are loath to call them writing, but they began the recording of mental states in external media.

In another way, knots in cords and notches in sticks served...

Marks in pottery and masonry could sign...