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“Man the food-gatherer reappears incongruously as information-gatherer,” remarked Marshall McLuhan in 1967.* He wrote this an instant too soon, in the first dawn of computation and cyberspace. We can see now that information is what our world runs on: the blood and the fuel, the vital principle.
External characters which are no part of themselves—this was the trouble.
Writing appeared to draw knowledge away from the person, to place their memories in storage. It also separated the speaker from the listener, by so many miles or years.
this first artificial memory
The alphabet spread by contagion. The new technology was both the virus and the vector of transmission. It could not be monopolized, and it could not be suppressed. Even children could learn these few, lightweight, semantically empty letters.
“It constituted an intrusion into culture, with results that proved irreversible. It laid the basis for the destruction of the oral way of life and the oral modes of thought.”
Many charters ended with the word “Goodbye.” Before writing could feel natural in itself—could become second nature—these echoes of voices had to fade away. Writing in and of itself had to reshape human consciousness.
One way of framing McLuhan’s critique of print would be to say that print offers only a narrow channel of communication. The channel is linear and even fragmented. By contrast, speech—in the primal case, face-to-face human intercourse, alive with gesture and touch—engages all the senses, not just hearing.
Not until the OED, though, did lexicography attempt to reveal the whole shape of a language across time. The OED becomes a historical panorama.
It no longer seems finite. Lexicographers are accepting the language’s boundlessness. They know by heart Murray’s famous remark: “The circle of the English language has a well-defined centre but no discernable circumference.” In the center are the words everyone knows. At the edges, where Murray placed slang and cant and scientific jargon and foreign border crossers, everyone’s sense of the language differs and no one’s can be called “standard.”
The whole word hoard—the lexis—constitutes a symbol set of the language. It is the fundamental symbol set, in one way: words are the first units of meaning any language recognizes. They are recognized universally.
step 1 in information
With one set of friends he formed a Ghost Club, dedicated to collecting evidence for and against occult spirits. With another set he founded a club called the Extractors, meant to sort out issues of sanity and insanity according to a set of procedures:
His true subject was information: messaging, encoding, processing.
He saw it not as an instrument of knowledge or of riches, but as an instrument of power. “The day will come,” he wrote, “when the Government will be able to achieve the grandest idea we can possibly have of power, by using the telegraph system in order to spread directly, every day, every hour, and simultaneously, its influence over the whole republic.”
idea that telegraph wd be form of govt control not freedom for individual
Cultural observers began to say that the telegraph was “annihilating” time and space. It “enables us to send communications, by means of the mysterious fluid, with the quickness of thought, and to annihilate time as well as space,” announced an American telegraph official in 1860.
space and time ...tofler analysis similar cultural concerns every time there is a significant technological development eg internet
It was the same with space. “Distance and time have been so changed in our imaginations,” said Josiah Latimer Clark, an English telegraph engineer, “that the globe has been practically reduced in magnitude, and there can be no doubt that our conception of its dimensions is entirely different to that held by our forefathers.”
A message had seemed to be a physical object. That was always an illusion; now people needed consciously to divorce their conception of the message from the paper on which it was written. Scientists, Harper’s explained, will say that the electric current “carries a message,” but one must not imagine that anything—any thing—is transported.
people struggle that messages are not physical thimgs
be called encoding. Two motivations went hand in glove: secrecy and brevity. Short messages saved money—that was simple. So powerful was that impulse that English prose style soon seemed to be feeling the effects.
like texting
Vail proposed using abbreviated versions of common phrases. Instead of “give my love to,” he suggested sending “gmlt.” He offered a few more suggestions: mhii My health is improving shf Stocks have fallen ymir Your message is received wmietg When may I expect the goods? wyegfef Will you exchange gold for eastern funds?
That Language is an instrument of human reason, and not merely a medium for the expression of thought.
different purposes for language enumerate...
The superintendent of the line in Wisconsin fretted about young men and women “constantly sparking over the wire” between Eau Claire and Chippewa Falls. “This free use of the line for flirtation purposes has grown to an alarming extent,” he wrote, “and if it is to go on somebody must pay for it.”
more parallels with textimg
all believing that the perfection of reasoning could come with the perfect encoding of thought.
seek the perfection of language
example of new revolutionary technology being rejected
The telegraph demanded literacy; the telephone embraced orality. A message sent by telegraph had first to be written, encoded, and tapped out by a trained intermediary. To employ the telephone, one just talked. A child could use it. For that very reason it seemed like a toy.
literacy for telegraph and later literacy for internet always need literacy speaking writing telegraph computer programing internet
What the telegraph accomplished in years the telephone has done in months. One year it was a scientific toy, with infinite possibilities of practical use; the next it was the basis of a system of communication the most rapidly expanding, intricate, and convenient that the world has known.… Soon it will be the rule and not the exception for business houses, indeed for the dwellings of well-to-do people as well, to be interlocked by means of telephone exchange, not merely in our cities, but in all outlying regions. The result can be nothing less than a new organization of society—a state of
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like the internet
The scattered members using telephones numbered half a million by 1890; by 1914, 10 million. The telephone was already thought, correctly, to be responsible for rapid industrial progress.
The first telephone operators were teenage boys, cheaply hired from the ranks of telegraph messengers, but exchanges everywhere discovered that boys were wild, given to clowning and practical jokes, and more likely to be found wrestling on the floor than sitting on stools to perform the exacting, repetitive work of a switchboard operator.
“Memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation,” he wrote. They compete with one another for limited resources: brain time or bandwidth. They compete most of all for attention.
diaspora.… Who’s in charge, according to this vision—we or our memes?”
For Dennett, the first four notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony were “clearly” a meme, along with Homer’s Odyssey (or at least the idea of the Odyssey), the wheel, anti-Semitism, and writing. “Memes have not yet found their Watson and Crick,”
We keep them alive in air-conditioned server farms. But we cannot own them. When a jingle lingers in our ears, or a fad turns fashion upside down, or a hoax dominates the global chatter for months and vanishes as swiftly as it came, who is master and who is slave?
It is the famous Occam’s razor. “We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances,” said Newton, “for nature is pleased with simplicity.”
The persistence of information, the difficulty of forgetting, so characteristic of our time, accretes confusion.
Edgar Allan Poe, following Babbage’s work eagerly, saw the point. “No thought can perish,”
The Qin dynasty burned China’s books in order to erase previous history.
It is about a controversy: whether Wikipedia should strive, in theory or in practice, to describe the whole world in all its detail.
Opposing factions coalesced around the labels “deletionism” and “inclusionism.”
In 2008 the novelist Nicholson Baker, calling himself Wageless, got sucked into Wikipedia like so many others, first seeking information and then tentatively supplying some, beginning one Friday evening with the article on bovine somatotropin and, the next day, Sleepless in Seattle, periodization, and hydraulic fluid. On Sunday it was pornochanchada (Brazilian sex films), a football player of the 1950s called Earl Blair, and back to hydraulic fluid. On Tuesday he discovered the Article Rescue Squadron, dedicated to finding articles in danger of deletion and saving them by making them better
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what about books or songs with same name
A more familiar metaphor is the cloud. All that information—all that information capacity—looms over us, not quite visible, not quite tangible, but awfully real; amorphous, spectral; hovering nearby, yet not situated in any one place. Heaven must once have felt this way to the faithful. People talk about shifting their lives to the cloud—their informational lives, at least.
but at the same time physical manifestation of info disappearing duvh as books
It is finally natural—even inevitable—to ask how much information is in the universe.
available to scholars: “that Bitch-goddess, Quantification”;
It was “a decisive point of no return in human history.” It shaped the modern mind.
