The Information

by James Gleick

  In 1963, reading the warnings of the president of the American Historical Association, Eisenstein found herself agreeing that the profession faced a crisis, of sorts. But she felt Bridenbaugh had it exactly backward. He thought the problem was forgetfulness: “As I see it,” he said dramatically, “mankind is faced with nothing short of the loss of its memory, and this memory is history.”♦ Eisenstein, looking at the same new information technologies that so troubled older historians, drew the opposite lesson. The past is not receding from view but, on the contrary, becoming more accessible and more visible. “In an age that has seen the deciphering of Linear B and the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls,” she wrote, “there appears to be little reason to be concerned about ‘the loss of mankind’s memory.’ There are good reasons for being concerned about the overloading of its circuits.” As for the amnesia lamented by Bridenbaugh and so many of his colleagues:

  This is a misreading of the predicament confronting historians today. It is not the onset of amnesia that accounts for present difficulties but a more complete recall than any prior generation has ever experienced. Steady recovery, not obliteration, accumulation, rather than loss, have led to the present impasse.♦

  From her point of view, a five-centuries-old communications revolution was still gathering momentum. How could they not see this?

  “Overloading of circuits” was a fairly new metaphor to express a sensation—too much information—that felt new. It had always felt new. One hungers for books; rereads a cherished few; begs or borrows more; waits at the library door, and perhaps, in the blink of an eye, finds oneself in a state of surfeit: too much to read. In 1621 the Oxford scholar Robert Burton (who amassed one of the world’s largest private libraries, 1,700 books, but never a thesaurus) gave voice to the feeling:

  I hear new news every day, and those ordinary rumours of war, plagues, fires, inundations, thefts, murders, massacres, meteors, comets, spectrums, prodigies, apparitions, of towns taken, cities besieged in France, Germany, Turkey, Persia, Poland, &c. daily musters and preparations, and such like, which these tempestuous times afford, battles fought, so many men slain, monomachies, shipwrecks, piracies, and sea-fights, peace, leagues, stratagems, and fresh alarms. A vast confusion of vows, wishes, actions, edicts, petitions, lawsuits, pleas, laws, proclamations, complaints, grievances are daily brought to our ears. New books every day, pamphlets, currantoes, stories, whole catalogues of volumes of all sorts, new paradoxes, opinions, schisms, heresies, controversies in philosophy, religion, &c. Now come tidings of weddings, maskings, mummeries, entertainments, jubilees, embassies, tilts and tournaments, trophies, triumphs, revels, sports, plays: then again, as in a new shifted scene, treasons, cheating tricks, robberies, enormous villanies in all kinds, funerals, burials, deaths of Princes, new discoveries, expeditions; now comical then tragical matters. To-day we hear of new Lords and officers created, to-morrow of some great men deposed, and then again of fresh honours conferred; one is let loose, another imprisoned; one purchaseth, another breaketh: he thrives, his neighbour turns bankrupt; now plenty, then again dearth and famine; one runs, another rides, wrangles, laughs, weeps &c. Thus I daily hear, and such like.♦

  He thought information glut was new then. He was not complaining; just amazed. Protests followed soon enough, however. Leibniz feared a return to barbarism—“to which result that horrible mass of books which keeps on growing might contribute very much. For in the end the disorder will become nearly insurmountable.”♦ Alexander Pope wrote satirically of “those days, when (after Providence had permitted the invention of Printing as a scourge for the sins of the learned) Paper also became so cheap, and printers so numerous, that a deluge of Authors covered the land.”♦

  Deluge became a common metaphor for people describing information surfeit. There is a sensation of drowning: information as a rising, churning flood. Or it calls to mind bombardment, data impinging in a series of blows, from all sides, too fast. Fear of the cacophony of voices can have a religious motivation, a worry about secular noise overwhelming the truth. T. S. Eliot expressed that in 1934:

  Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;

  Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.

  All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,

  All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,

  But nearness to death no nearer to GOD.♦

  Or one may dread the breaching of walls that stand before what is unfamiliar, or horrible, or terrifying. Or one may lose the ability to impose order on the chaos of sensations. The truth seems harder to find amid the multitude of plausible fictions.

  After “information theory” came to be, so did “information overload,” “information glut,” “information anxiety,” and “information fatigue,” the last recognized by the OED in 2009 as a timely syndrome: “Apathy, indifference, or mental exhaustion arising from exposure to too much information, esp. (in later use) stress induced by the attempt to assimilate excessive amounts of information from the media, the Internet, or at work.” Sometimes information anxiety can coexist with boredom, a particularly confusing combination. David Foster Wallace had a more ominous name for this modern condition: Total Noise. “The tsunami of available fact, context, and perspective”♦—that, he wrote in 2007, constitutes Total Noise. He talked about the sensation of drowning and also of a loss of autonomy, of personal responsibility for being informed. To keep up with all the information we need proxies and subcontractors.

  Another way to speak of the anxiety is in terms of the gap between information and knowledge. A barrage of data so often fails to tell us what we need to know. Knowledge, in turn, does not guarantee enlightenment or wisdom. (Eliot said that, too: “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? / Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”) It is an ancient observation, but one that seemed to bear restating when information became plentiful—particularly in a world where all bits are created equal and information is divorced from meaning. The humanist and philosopher of technology Lewis Mumford, for example, restated it in 1970: “Unfortunately, ‘information retrieving,’ however swift, is no substitute for discovering by direct personal inspection knowledge whose very existence one had possibly never been aware of, and following it at one’s own pace through the further ramification of relevant literature.”♦ He begged for a return to “moral self-discipline.” There is a whiff of nostalgia in this sort of warning, along with an undeniable truth: that in the pursuit of knowledge, slower can be better. Exploring the crowded stacks of musty libraries has its own rewards. Reading—even browsing—an old book can yield sustenance denied by a database search. Patience is a virtue, gluttony a sin.

  Even in 1970, however, Mumford was not thinking about databases or any of the electronic technologies that loomed. He complained about “the multiplication of microfilms.” He also complained about too many books. Without “self-imposed restraints,” he warned, “the overproduction of books will bring about a state of intellectual enervation and depletion hardly to be distinguished from massive ignorance.” Restraints were not imposed. Titles continue to multiply. Books about information glut join the cornucopia; no irony is intended when the online bookseller Amazon.com transmits messages like “Start reading Data Smog on your Kindle in under a minute” and “Surprise me! See a random page in this book.”

  The electronic communication technologies arrived so quickly, almost without warning. The word e-mail appeared in print (so far as the OED can determine) in 1982, in Computerworld magazine, which had barely heard reports: “ADR/Email is reportedly easy to use and features simple, English verbs and prompt screens.” Next year, the journal Infosystems declared, “Email promotes movement of information through space.” And the year after that—still a full decade before most people heard the word—a Swedish computer scientist named Jacob Palme at the QZ Computer Center in Stockholm issued a prescient warning—as simple, accurate, and thorough as any that followed in the next decades. Palme began:

&
nbsp; Electronic mail system can, if used by many people, cause severe information overload problems. The cause of this problem is that it is so easy to send a message to a large number of people, and that systems are often designed to give the sender too much control of the communication process, and the receiver too little control.…♦

  People get too many messages, which they do not have time to read. This also means that the really important messages are difficult to find in a large flow of less important messages.

  In the future, when we get larger and larger message systems, and these systems get more and more interconnected, this will be a problem for almost all users of these systems.

  He had statistics from his local network: the average message took 2 minutes, 36 seconds to write and just 28 seconds to read. Which would have been fine, except that people could so easily send many copies of the same message.

  When psychologists or sociologists try to study information overload with the methods of their disciplines, they get mixed results. As early as 1963, a pair of psychologists set out to quantify the effect of extra information on the process of clinical diagnosis.♦ As they expected, they found that “too much information”—not easy to define, they admitted—often contaminated judgment. They titled their paper “Does One Sometimes Know Too Much?” and somewhat gleefully listed alternative titles, as a bonus: “Never Have So Many Done So Little”; “Are You Getting More Now But Predicting It Less?”; and “Too Much Information Is a Dangerous Thing.” Others tried to measure the effects of information load on blood pressure, heart rhythms, and respiration rates.

  One worker in the area was Siegfried Streufert, who reported in a series of papers in the 1960s that the relation between information load and information handling typically looked like an “inverted U”: more information was helpful at first, then not so helpful, and then actually harmful. One of his studies took 185 university students (all male) and had them pretend to be commanders making decisions in a tactical game. They were told:

  The information you are receiving is prepared for you in the same way it would be prepared for real commanders by a staff of intelligence officers.… You may instruct these intelligence officers to increase or decrease the amount of information they present to you.… Please check your preference: I would prefer to:

  receive much more information

  receive a little more information

  receive about the same amount of information

  receive a little less information

  receive much less information.♦

  No matter what they chose, their preferences were ignored. The experimenter, not the subjects, predetermined the amount of information. Streufert concluded from the data that “superoptimal” information loads caused poor performance, “yet it should be noted that even at highly superoptimal information loads (i.e., 25 messages per 30-minute period), the subjects are still asking for increased information levels.” Later, he used similar methodology to study the effects of drinking too much coffee.

  By the 1980s, researchers were speaking confidently about the “information-load paradigm.”♦ This was a paradigm based on a truism: that people can only “absorb” or “process” a limited amount of information. Various investigators found surfeits causing not only confusion and frustration, but also blurred vision and dishonesty. Experiments themselves had a broad menu of information to process: measurements of memory span; ideas of channel capacity drawn from Shannon; and variations on the theme of signal-to-noise ratio. A common, if dubious, approach to research was direct introspection. One small project in 1998 took as a “community or folk group” graduate students in library and information science at the University of Illinois; all agreed, when asked, that they suffered from information overload, due to “e-mail, meetings, listservs, and in-basket paper piles.”♦ Most felt that a surfeit of information tainted their leisure time as well as their work time. Some reported headaches. The tentative conclusion: information overload is real; also, it is both a “code phrase” and a myth. The research can only press onward.

  Having to think of information as a burden is confusing, as Charles Bennett says. “We pay to have newspapers delivered, not taken away.”♦ But the thermodynamics of computation shows that yesterday’s newspaper takes up space that Maxwell’s demon needs for today’s work, and modern experience teaches the same. Forgetting used to be a failing, a waste, a sign of senility. Now it takes effort. It may be as important as remembering.

  Facts were once dear; now they are cheap. Once, people would turn to the pages of Whitaker’s Almanack, published yearly in Britain, or the World Almanac, in the United States, to find the names and dates of monarchs and presidents, tables of holidays and high water, sizes and populations of faraway places, or the ships and chief officers of the navy. Lacking the almanac, or seeking an even more obscure fact, they might call on a man or woman of experience behind a desk at a public library. When George Bernard Shaw needed the whereabouts of the nearest crematorium—his wife was dying—he opened the almanac and was aggrieved. “I have just found an astonishing omission in Whitaker,” he wrote to the editor. “As the desired information is just what one goes to your invaluable almanack for, may I suggest that a list of the 58 crematoria now working in the country, and instructions what to do, would be a very desirable addition.”♦ His letter is poignant. He does not mention his wife—only “a case of serious illness”—and refers to himself as “the bereaved enquirer.” Shaw had a telegraph address and a telephone but took it for granted that facts were to be found in print.

  For many, the telephone had already begun to extend the reach of the inquisitive. Twentieth-century people realized that they could know instantly the scores of sporting events they had not witnessed; so many came up with the idea of telephoning the newspaper that The New York Times felt compelled to print a front-page notice in 1929 begging readers to desist: “Don’t Ask by Telephone for World’s Series Scores.”♦ Now the information, in “real time,” is considered a birthright.

  What do you do when you have everything at last? Daniel Dennett imagined—in 1990, just before the Internet made this dream possible—that electronic networks could upend the economics of publishing poetry. Instead of slim books, elegant specialty items marketed to connoisseurs, what if poets could publish online, instantly reaching not hundreds but millions of readers, not for tens of dollars but for fractions of pennies? That same year, Sir Charles Chadwyck-Healey, a publisher, conceived of the English Poetry Full-Text Database as he walked one day through the British Library, and four years later he had produced it—not the present or future of poetry, but the past, and not, at first, online but in four compact discs, 165,000 poems by 1,250 poets spanning thirteen centuries, priced at $51,000. Readers and critics had to figure out what to make of this. Not read it, surely, the way they would read a book. Read in it, perhaps. Search it, for a word or an epigraph or a fragment half remembered.

  Anthony Lane, reviewing the database for The New Yorker, found himself swinging from elation to dismay and back. “You hunch like a pianist over the keys,” he wrote, “knowing what awaits you, thinking, Ah, the untold wealth of English literature! What hidden jewels I shall excavate from the deepest mines of human fancy!”♦ Then come the macaronics, the clunkers, the flood of bombast and mediocrity. The sheer unordered mass begins to wear you down. Not that Lane sounds at all weary. “What a steaming heap,” he cries, and he revels in it. “Never have I beheld such a magnificent tribute to the powers of human incompetence—and also, by the same token, to the blessings of human forgetfulness.” Where else would he have found the utterly forgotten Thomas Freeman (not in Wikipedia) and this lovely self-referential couplet:

  Whoop, whoop, me thinkes I heare my Reader cry,

  Here is rime doggrell: I confesse it I.

  The CD-ROMs are already obsolete. All English poetry is in the network now—or if not all, some approximation thereof, and if not now, then soon.

  The past folds accordio
n-like into the present. Different media have different event horizons—for the written word, three millennia; for recorded sound, a century and a half—and within their time frames the old becomes as accessible as the new. Yellowed newspapers come back to life. Under headings of 50 Years Ago and 100 Years Ago, veteran publications recycle their archives: recipes, card-play techniques, science, gossip, once out of print and now ready for use. Record companies rummage through their attics to release, or re-release, every scrap of music, rarities, B-sides, and bootlegs. For a certain time, collectors, scholars, or fans possessed their books and their records. There was a line between what they had and what they did not. For some, the music they owned (or the books, or the videos) became part of who they were. That line fades away. Most of Sophocles’ plays are lost, but those that survive are available at the touch of a button. Most of Bach’s music was unknown to Beethoven; we have it all—partitas, cantatas, and ringtones. It comes to us instantly, or at light speed. It is a symptom of omniscience. It is what the critic Alex Ross calls the Infinite Playlist, and he sees how mixed is the blessing: “anxiety in place of fulfillment, an addictive cycle of craving and malaise. No sooner has one experience begun than the thought of what else is out there intrudes.” The embarrassment of riches. Another reminder that information is not knowledge, and knowledge is not wisdom.

  Strategies emerge for coping. There are many, but in essence they all boil down to two: filter and search. The harassed consumer of information turns to filters to separate the metal from the dross; filters include blogs and aggregators—the choice raises issues of trust and taste. The need for filters intrudes on any thought experiment about the wonders of abundant information. When Dennett imagined his Complete Poetry Network, he saw the problem. “The obvious counterhypothesis arises from population memetics,”♦ he said. “If such a network were established, no poetry lover would be willing to wade through thousands of electronic files filled with doggerel, looking for good poems.” Filters would be needed—editors and critics. “They flourish because of the short supply and limited capacity of minds, whatever the transmission media between minds.” When information is cheap, attention becomes expensive.