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A L S O__T O D A Y
- - - - - - - - - - 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 The 21st Challenge No. 16 Results What does technology want? Is Rio grand? Internet activism, Czech-style - - - - - - - - - - BROWSE THE - - - - - - - - - -
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INFORMATION THEORY AND PRACTICE | PAGE 1, 2
The authors' observation that we don't really get information sends them on an erudite romp through what they identify as the three great "Information Ages": classical, modern and contemporary. It's an impressive exercise; most information-theory narratives are sufficiently ahistorical that they view antiquity as metaphorically useful but substantively irrelevant. Hobart and Schiffman take the opposite stance. They perceive the shift from oral to written culture not just as an epochal development in human history but as a momentous -- and perhaps traumatic -- event in the definition of memory. "The claim that information once did not exist, that is has a history, sounds absurd," they concede. Still, they argue this very point, maintaining that "in the world before writing, memory is the social act of remembering. It is commemoration." And, according to the authors, "commemoration precluded information." Information, thus defined, is inaugurated in the classical age, via alphabetic writing, as humanity's first stab at abstraction. What follows is primarily a story of increasing abstraction, moving through counting, classification, taxonomies, mathematics -- and culminating in the purely self-referential era that lets us enjoy general relativity, iMacs, PalmPilots and the Web. It's a tale of discovery, of pushing said discovery to the absolute limits, watching it collapse under its own contradictions, then seeing it replaced by something new. And therein lies the deeply conservative pattern of common sense that permits Hobart and Schiffman to pull off their grand intellectual history: Toward the end of their narrative, once theoretical physics and math have effectively posited an invisible world, in come Boolean logic and computing pioneers Alan Turing and John von Neumann, "The Realm of Pure Technique" and "Information Play." Hobart and Schiffman's third information age relies on two complementary tenets, "power" and "play": "Computer power gives us the black-white, on-off, distilled and abstract starkness of our information age, while play burst forth in an extravaganza of color and hue, painting a richly textured information canvas." Yes, it's another case of a pair of academic wonks pledging allegiance to machine beauty, but at least Hobart and Schiffman have done their legwork before indulging in a minor epistemological curlicue. But the message is clear: Literacy eventually failed the scientific need to analyze an increasingly complex world; numeracy became so esoteric that only a cadre of secular priests could practice it. Finally, "information today has become a world unto itself, a world whose abstract symbols can be assigned arbitrarily to any objects and procedures whatsoever." The authors acknowledge that this revelation is a tempting invite to vulgar relativists of every stripe. But they have a trump card -- computers. Devices that manage information rather than classify or analyze it, the best thing about computers is that they work. Even better, they work in history, propelling the third information age into the future, adhering to the "time's arrow" view of linear historical progress that, according to Hobart and Schiffman, has threatened to peter out twice since the advent of their first information age. Just as things start to look excessively complex, as if all the questions that can be answered have been and information has nowhere left to go, information finds a new way to keep itself moving forward. What Hobart and Shiffman have achieved through this cheery analysis is one of the more decisive refutations of the various "End of History" arguments that have been floated over the past 15 years. Information "ages," they pun, but history lives forever. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - In place of Hobart and Schiffman's elegant optimism, James O'Donnell's "Avatars of the Word" offers a slightly grimmer view of the information revolution -- one much closer to the ground, but equally well-grounded in a "time's arrow" philosophy. A classics professor and information systems guru at the University of Pennsylvania, O'Donnell has tried to split the difference between a Luddite ideology that demands a world of readers and writers, and a technoculture that views literacy much more fluidly -- but whose ascendance could have grave consequences for the humanities and the liberal arts. "Fixity," according to O'Donnell, is the hobgoblin of technophobic minds:
Good riddance, then, to the omnipotent author; bring on the hypertext collaborator instead. By dispensing with the hoary old figure of solitary creative genius, O'Donnell maintains, we will finally be able to free our universities from their obsequious, artificial devotion to the idea of a classical education. And why should we? Because the history of Western thought is just a fashionable tale, one that has benefited over the centuries from patronage and accident; it is merely one narrative among many, achieving an undeserved mastery over its competitors (the Eastern Orthodox story, the Islamic story, the Chinese story). Cyberspace, O'Donnell believes, will prevent this sort of offense from recurring. However, he also believes that it will alter the mission of the university, possibly even ending the era of the tenured professor. Replacing such "wise men" will be a renaissance of librarians -- enlightened functionaries whose role is not to style information but to manage it. In this sense, librarians are much more fitting adjuncts for computers than old-fashioned scholars. This is about as radical as O'Donnell is willing to get. The unfortunate problem with his book is that, although it strives to endorse an enthusiasm for new technocultural forums (online chats for grad students, for instance), its punditry feels fogyish and dated. "The technologies now in our hand," he writes, "break down barriers, blur boundaries, and facilitate connections. Our task is not to create a new Greater Disney World or define the future. It is rather to explore openings, multiply possibilities, and venture down enticing pathways. It is too early for grand plans and instead a time for exuberance." Hubba-hubba. O'Donnell's vision resembles the charter for an admirable online community, but it ignores the two main, distinctly unacademic directions in which technoculture is currently moving: e-commerce and open-source software. Neither of these is necessarily hostile to "the word" as such, but both signal a practicality more in line with Hobart and Schiffman's positing of the computer as the great rebuke to information-fetishizing pinheadedness. O'Donnell, by contrast, is mired in the veritable prehistory of the old "Will content survive?" conundrum, a worry assuaged by the ongoing viability of numerous content-intensive Web sites. Like computers themselves, content just works. By the end of his book, however, O'Donnell makes peace with his worries: "I have been given the chance to live on the edge of exciting cultural upheavals ... even if they leave me and my kind in the end unemployed and unemployable." Matthew DeBord is a contributing editor at Feed.
"Information Ages: Literacy, Numeracy, and the Computer Revolution" "Avatars of the Word: From Papyrus to Cyberspace" |
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