.

Information Ages: Literacy, Numeracy, & the Computer Revolution Avatars of the Word: From Papyrus to Cyberspace A L S O__T O D A Y Internet censure-ship By Janelle Brown Can the Censure and Move On Web site make a difference? - - - - - - - - - - T A B L E__T A L K Discuss the programs you can't function without and why in the Digital Culture area of Table Talk - - - - - - - - - - R E C E N T L Y You've got sendmail By Andrew Leonard Eric Allman's free program makes sure your e-mail gets through. Now it's going commercial (12/11/98) The 21st Challenge No. 16 Results By Charlie Varon and Jim Rosenau Mystery misdirected e-mail (12/11/98) What does technology want? By R.U. Sirius Kevin Kelly talks about his "New Rules for the New Economy" (12/10/98) Is Rio grand? By Janelle Brown With the new MP3 player, the future of online music distribution is here now -- it's just a bit slow (12/09/98) Internet activism, Czech-style By Mark Schapiro The Communists are yesterday's target -- today, it's the phone company's Net-access rate hikes (12/08/98) - - - - - - - - - - BROWSE THE 21ST BOOKS ARCHIVES - - - - - - - - - - 21st Log Make money fast on the Internet! - - - - - - - - - - S A L O N E M P O R I U M FREE! 12-ounce bag of Salon Blend with a purchase of $30 or more. While supplies last.

Information theory and practice Once upon a time, "information" didn't even exist. Now it's everywhere. Two new books tell how that happened. BY MATTHEW DEBORD | Since computing exited the room-filling, 1940s mainframe aesthetic of ENIAC in the '70s and '80s, transferring the swift management of data from research elites to the democratic home front, information intellectuals and consumers alike have sought analogies to explain this apparent revolution in their midst. Two popular ones have been the discovery of fire (which seems a little arrogant, a little too fundamental) and Gutenberg's development of movable type (which supplies a neatly symmetrical technology for information dissemination). Neither, however, goes to the core of the issue: that it isn't an elemental force or liminal technology we should be obsessing over, but rather the history of information itself. Fire is dramatic, printing familiar -- but neither actually means anything. Alphabets, however, do. Numbers as well. They seek to describe the "real" world, albeit in a reduced way. The very explicit ideology of information represented by the computer is the vital third side of this perfect triangle, as Michael E. Hobart and Zachary S. Schiffman describe it in their new book, "Information Ages." But Hobart and Schiffman are the first to suggest that it's the least coherent: "Information has become the dominant metaphor of our age, through which we understand ourselves and the world," they write in their introduction. "Yet when we stop to think about it, we really do not know much about this idiom." By the end of their undertaking, they offer this redoubtable summary for all those infonauts who often struggle in vain to locate paradoxes that aren't maddening: Following information's history has led us back to the present, where we began, to our contemporary age and idiom. But we return home with a difference. Our age stands as the pinnacle of abstraction in the historical development of information. Yet, embedded in these abstractions, asymmetrical time and emergence in the sciences of complexity bring us closer to our basic, reflective nature as the species that understands its own experiences in time-bound process. This is a happy paradox, one that most people will be able to live with. And it's a typical verdict for "Information Ages," one of those rare books about the current vogue for -- broadly speaking -- "information theory" that proceeds from 1) a simple premise; 2) a lucid structure; and 3) a relentlessly synthetic attitude toward the history of human thought. Simply put, Hobart (a history professor at Bryant College) and Schiffman (a history professor at Northeastern Illinois University) only have one idea. It is, however, such a good idea that it has allowed them to write a book oakenly dense with scholarship, which nevertheless hums right along with suspenseful narrative energy. The idea? Prior to the Mesopotamian invention of writing, information didn't exist. And even though they kick things off with Homer and "The Iliad," 3,000 years deep in the lineage of Western cognition, Hobart and Schiffman still have you salivating on the edge of your seat, muttering an expectant readerly mantra: Bring on the computers. Bring on the REAL information. N E X T_ P A G E .|.Three ages of information, culminating in PalmPilots and the Web