by James Gleick
♦ “A DECISIVE POINT OF NO RETURN”: Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, “Clio and Chronos: An Essay on the Making and Breaking of History-Book Time,” History and Theory 6, suppl. 6: History and the Concept of Time (1966), 64.
♦ “ATTITUDES TOWARD HISTORICAL CHANGE”: Ibid., 42.
♦ “SCRIBAL CULTURE”: Ibid., 61.
♦ PRINT WAS TRUSTWORTHY, RELIABLE, AND PERMANENT: Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, 624 ff.
♦ “AS I SEE IT … MANKIND IS FACED WITH NOTHING SHORT OF”: Carl Bridenbaugh, “The Great Mutation,” 326.
♦ “THIS IS A MISREADING OF THE PREDICAMENT”: Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, “Clio and Chronos,” 39.
♦ “I HEAR NEW NEWS EVERY DAY”: Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Floyd Dell and Paul Jordan-Smith (New York: Tudor, 1927), 14.
♦ “TO WHICH RESULT THAT HORRIBLE MASS OF BOOKS”: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Leibniz Selections, ed. Philip P. Wiener (New York: Scribner’s, 1951), 29; cf. Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962), 254.
♦ “THOSE DAYS, WHEN (AFTER PROVIDENCE”: Alexander Pope, The Dunciad (1729) (London: Methuen, 1943), 41.
♦ “KNOWLEDGE OF SPEECH, BUT NOT OF SILENCE”: T. S. Eliot, “The Rock,” in Collected Poems: 1909–1962 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1963), 147.
♦ “THE TSUNAMI OF AVAILABLE FACT”: David Foster Wallace, Introduction to The Best American Essays 2007 (New York: Mariner, 2007).
♦ “UNFORTUNATELY, ‘INFORMATION RETRIEVING,’ HOWEVER SWIFT”: Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine, vol. 2, The Pentagon of Power (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1970), 182.
♦ “ELECTRONIC MAIL SYSTEM”: Jacob Palme, “You Have 134 Unread Mail! Do You Want to Read Them Now?” in Computer-Based Message Services, ed. Hugh T. Smith (North Holland: Elsevier, 1984), 175–76.
♦ A PAIR OF PSYCHOLOGISTS: C. J. Bartlett and Calvin G. Green, “Clinical Prediction: Does One Sometimes Know Too Much,” Journal of Counseling Psychology 13, no. 3 (1966): 267–70.
♦ “THE INFORMATION YOU ARE RECEIVING IS PREPARED FOR YOU”: Siegfried Streufert et al., “Conceptual Structure, Information Search, and Information Utilization,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 2, no. 5 (1965): 736–40.
♦ “INFORMATION-LOAD PARADIGM”: For example, Naresh K. Malhotra, “Information Load and Consumer Decision Making,” Journal of Consumer Research 8 (March 1982): 419.
♦ “E-MAIL, MEETINGS, LISTSERVS, AND IN-BASKET PAPER PILES”: Tonyia J. Tidline, “The Mythology of Information Overload,” Library Trends 47, no. 3 (Winter 1999): 502.
♦ “WE PAY TO HAVE NEWSPAPERS DELIVERED”: Charles H. Bennett, “Demons, Engines, and the Second Law,” Scientific American 257, no. 5 (1987): 116.
♦ “AS THE DESIRED INFORMATION”: G. Bernard Shaw to the Editor, Whitaker’s Almanack, 31 May 1943.
♦ “DON’T ASK BY TELEPHONE FOR WORLD’S SERIES SCORES”: The New York Times, 8 October 1929, 1.
♦ “YOU HUNCH LIKE A PIANIST”: Anthony Lane, “Byte Verse,” The New Yorker, 20 February 1995, 108.
♦ “THE OBVIOUS COUNTERHYPOTHESIS ARISES”: Daniel C. Dennett, “Memes and the Exploitation of Imagination,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 48 (1990): 132.
♦ “TAKE THE LIBRARY OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM”: Augustus De Morgan, Arithmetical Books: From the Invention of Printing to the Present Time (London: Taylor & Walton, 1847), ix.
♦ “THE MULTITUDE OF BOOKS, THE SHORTNESS OF TIME”: Vincent of Beauvais, Prologue, Speculum Maius, quoted in Ann Blair, “Reading Strategies for Coping with Information Overload ca. 1550–1700,” Journal of the History of Ideas 64, no. 1 (2003): 12.
♦ “THE PERCEPTION OF AN OVERABUNDANCE”: Ibid.
♦ “DRIVEN BY THE NEED TO MASTER THE INFORMATION OVERLOAD”: Brian W. Ogilvie, “The Many Books of Nature: Renaissance Naturalists and Information Overload,” Journal of the History of Ideas 64, no. 1 (2003): 40.
♦ “A MAN WHO HAS SOMETHING TO SAY”: Bertolt Brecht, Radio Theory (1927), quoted in Kathleen Woodward, The Myths of Information: Technology and Postindustrial Culture (Madison, Wisc.: Coda Press, 1980).
EPILOGUE
♦ “IT WAS INEVITABLE THAT MEANING”: Jean-Pierre Dupuy, The Mechanization of the Mind: On the Origins of Cognitive Science, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), 119.
♦ “WE ARE TODAY AS FAR INTO THE ELECTRIC AGE”: Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962), 1.
♦ “TODAY … WE HAVE EXTENDED OUR CENTRAL NERVOUS SYSTEMS”: Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965), 3.
♦ “WHAT WHISPERS ARE THESE”: Walt Whitman, “Years of the Modern,” Leaves of Grass (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1919), 272.
♦ THEOLOGIANS BEGAN SPEAKING OF A SHARED MIND: For example, “Two beings, or two millions—any number thus placed ‘in communication’—all possess one mind.” Parley Parker Pratt, Key to the Science of Theology (1855), quoted in John Durham Peters, Speaking Into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 275.
♦ “IT BECOMES ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY”: “… this amounts to imagining, above the animal biosphere and continuing it, a human sphere, the sphere of reflection, of conscious and free invention, of thought strictly speaking, in short, the sphere of mind or noosphere.” Édouard Le Roy, Les Origines humaines et l’évolution de l’intelligence (Paris: Boivin et Cie, 1928), quoted and translated by M. J. Aronson, Journal of Philosophy 27, no. 18 (28 August 1930): 499.
♦ “DOES IT NOT SEEM AS THOUGH A GREAT BODY”: Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Human Phenomenon, trans. Sarah Appleton-Weber (Brighton, U.K.: Sussex Academic Press, 1999), 174.
♦ “NONSENSE, TRICKED OUT”: Mind 70, no. 277 (1961): 99. Medawar did not much like Teilhard’s prose, either: “that tipsy, euphoric prose-poetry which is one of the more tiresome manifestations of the French spirit.”
♦ WRITERS OF SCIENCE FICTION: Perhaps first and most notably Olaf Stapledon, Last and First Men (London: Methuen, 1930).
♦ “OUR MULTITUDE OF UNCO-ORDINATED GANGLIA”: H. G. Wells, World Brain (London: Methuen, 1938), xiv.
♦ “IN A FEW SCORE YEARS”: Ibid., 56.
♦ “SORT OF CEREBRUM FOR HUMANITY”: Ibid., 63.
♦ “A NETWORK OF MARVELLOUSLY GNARLED AND TWISTED STEMS”: H. G. Wells, The Passionate Friends (London: Harper, 1913), 332; H. G. Wells, The War in the Air (New York: Macmillan, 1922), 14.
♦ “IT’S NOT IN THE BEEPS”: Quoted in Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman, Dark Hero of the Information Age: In Search of Norbert Wiener, the Father of Cybernetics (New York: Basic Books, 2005), 189.
♦ “I KNOW AN UNCOUTH REGION”: Jorge Luis Borges, “The Library of Babel,” Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings (New York: New Directions, 1962), 54.
♦ “BEAUTY IS IN THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER”: Fred I. Dretske, Knowledge and the Flow of Information (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981), vii.
♦ “I TAKE ‘HELL’ IN ITS THEOLOGICAL SENSE”: Jean-Pierre Dupuy, “Myths of the Informational Society,” in Kathleen Woodward, The Myths of Information: Technology and Postindustrial Culture (Madison, Wisc.: Coda Press, 1980), 3.
♦ “I IMAGINE … THAT THE ENTRIES OF THE DICTIONARY”: Dexter Palmer, The Dream of Perpetual Motion (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2010), 220.
♦ “ALL HUMAN THOUGHTS MIGHT BE ENTIRELY RESOLVABLE”: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, De scientia universali seu calculo philosophico, 1875; cf. Umberto Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language, trans. James Fentress (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1995), 281.
♦ “IS IT SIGNALING, LIKE TELEGRAPHS?”: Margaret Atwood, “Atwood in the Twittersphere,” The New York Review of Books blog, http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2010/mar/29/atwood-in-the-twittersphere/, 29 March 2010.
♦ “GO MAD IN HERDS”: Charles Mackay, Memoirs of Extraordinary Popula
r Delusions (Philadelphia: Lindsay & Blakiston, 1850), 14.
♦ BROWSE SU[BJECT] CENSORSHIP: Nicholson Baker, “Discards” (1994), in The Size of Thoughts: Essays and Other Lumber (New York: Random House, 1996), 168.
♦ “WE HAVE A LEXICON OF THE CURRENT LANGUAGE”: Interview, Allan Jennings, February 1996; James Gleick, “Here Comes the Spider,” in What Just Happened: A Chronicle from the Information Frontier (New York: Pantheon, 2002), 128–32.
♦ “I READ SOMEWHERE THAT EVERYBODY ON THIS PLANET”: John Guare, Six Degrees of Separation (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1990), 45.
♦ THE IDEA CAN BE TRACED BACK: Albert-László Barabási, Linked (New York: Plume, 2003), 26 ff.
♦ WHAT WATTS AND STROGATZ DISCOVERED: Duncan J. Watts and Steven H. Strogatz, “Collective Dynamics of ‘Small-World’ Networks,” Nature 393 (1998): 440–42; also Duncan J. Watts, Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age (New York: Norton, 2003); Albert-László Barabási, Linked.
♦ “INFECTIOUS DISEASES ARE PREDICTED”: Duncan J. Watts and Steven H. Strogatz, “Collective Dynamics of ‘Small-World’ Networks,” 442.
♦ “WE WANT THE DEMON, YOU SEE”: Stanislaw Lem, The Cyberiad, trans. Michael Kandel (London: Secker & Warburg, 1975), 155.
♦ “WHEN IT WAS PROCLAIMED”: Jorge Luis Borges, “The Library of Babel,” Labyrinths, 54.
♦ “HE THAT DESIRES TO PRINT A BOOK”: John Donne, “From a Sermon Preached before King Charles I” (April 1627).
Bibliography
Aaboe, Asger. Episodes from the Early History of Mathematics. New York: L. W. Singer, 1963.
Adams, Frederick. “The Informational Turn in Philosophy.” Minds and Machines 13 (2003): 471–501.
Allen, William, and Thomas R. H. Thompson. A Narrative of the Expedition to the River Niger in 1841. London: Richard Bentley, 1848.
Archer, Charles Maybury, ed. The London Anecdotes: The Electric Telegraph, vol. 1. London: David Bogue, 1848.
Archibald, Raymond Clare. “Seventeenth Century Calculating Machines.” Mathematical Tables and Other Aids to Computation 1:1 (1943): 27–28.
Aspray, William. “From Mathematical Constructivity to Computer Science: Alan Turing, John Von Neumann, and the Origins of Computer Science in Mathematical Logic.” PhD thesis, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1980.
———. “The Scientific Conceptualization of Information: A Survey.” Annals of the History of Computing 7, no. 2 (1985): 117–40.
Aunger, Robert, ed. Darwinizing Culture: The Status of Memetics as a Science. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Avery, John. Information Theory and Evolution. Singapore: World Scientific, 2003.
Baars, Bernard J. The Cognitive Revolution in Psychology. New York: Guilford Press, 1986.
Babbage, Charles. “On a Method of Expressing by Signs the Action of Machinery.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 116, no. 3(1826): 250–65.
———. Reflections on the Decline of Science in England and on Some of Its Causes. London: B. Fellowes, 1830.
———. Table of the Logarithms of the Natural Numbers, From 1 to 108,000. London: B. Fellowes, 1831.
———. On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures. 4th ed. London: Charles Knight, 1835.
———. The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise. A Fragment. 2nd ed. London: John Murray, 1838.
———. Passages from the Life of a Philosopher. London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, & Green, 1864.
———. Charles Babbage and His Calculating Engines: Selected Writings. Edited by Philip Morrison and Emily Morrison. New York: Dover Publications, 1961.
———. The Analytical Engine and Mechanical Notation. New York: New York University Press, 1989.
———. The Difference Engine and Table Making. New York: New York University Press, 1989.
———. The Works of Charles Babbage. Edited by Martin Campbell-Kelly. New York: New York University Press, 1989.
Babbage, Henry Prevost, ed. Babbage’s Calculating Engines: Being a Collection of Papers Relating to Them; Their History and Construction. London: E. & F. N. Spon, 1889.
Bairstow, Jeff. “The Father of the Information Age.” Laser Focus World (2002): 114.
Baker, Nicholson. The Size of Thoughts: Essays and Other Lumber. New York: Random House, 1996.
Ball, W. W. Rouse. A History of the Study of Mathematics at Cambridge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1889.
Bar-Hillel, Yehoshua. “An Examination of Information Theory.” Philosophy of Science 22, no. 2 (1955): 86–105.
Barabási, Albert-László. Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life. New York: Plume, 2003.
Barnard, G. A. “The Theory of Information.” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series B 13, no. 1 (1951): 46–64.
Baron, Sabrina Alcorn, Eric N. Lindquist, and Eleanor F. Shevlin. Agent of Change: Print Culture Studies After Elizabeth L. Eisenstein. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007.
Bartlett, C. J., and Calvin G. Green. “Clinical Prediction: Does One Sometimes Know Too Much.” Journal of Counseling Psychology 13, no. 3 (1966): 267–70.
Barwise, Jon. “Information and Circumstance.” Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 27, no. 3 (1986): 324–38.
Battelle, John. The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture. New York: Portfolio, 2005.
Baugh, Albert C. A History of the English Language. 2nd ed. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1957.
Baum, Joan. The Calculating Passion of Ada Byron. Hamden, Conn.: Shoe String Press, 1986.
Belot, Gordon, John Earman, and Laura Ruetsche. “The Hawking Information Loss Paradox: The Anatomy of a Controversy.” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 50 (1999): 189–229.
Benjamin, Park. A History of Electricity (the Intellectual Rise in Electricity) from Antiquity to the Days of Benjamin Franklin. New York: Wiley and Sons, 1898.
Bennett, Charles H. “On Random and Hard-to-Describe Numbers.” IBM Watson Research Center Report RC 7483 (1979).
———. “The Thermodynamics of Computation—A Review.” International Journal of Theoretical Physics 21, no. 12 (1982): 906–40.
———. “Dissipation, Information, Computational Complexity and the Definition of Organization.” In Emerging Syntheses in Science, edited by D. Pines, 297–313. Santa Fe: Santa Fe Institute, 1985.
———. “Demons, Engines, and the Second Law.” Scientific American 257, no. 5 (1987): 108–16.
———. “Logical Depth and Physical Complexity.” In The Universal Turing Machine: A Half-Century Survey, edited by Rolf Herken. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.
———. “How to Define Complexity in Physics, and Why.” In Complexity, Entropy, and the Physics of Information, edited by W. H. Zurek. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1990.
———. “Notes on the History of Reversible Computation.” IBM Journal of Research and Development 44 (2000): 270–77.
———. “Notes on Landauer’s Principle, Reversible Computation, and Maxwell’s Demon.” arXiv:physics 0210005 v2 (2003).
———. “Publicity, Privacy, and Permanence of Information.” In Quantum Computing: Back Action 2006, AIP Conference Proceedings 864, edited by Debabrata Goswami. Melville, N.Y.: American Institute of Physics, 2006.
Bennett, Charles H., and Gilles Brassard. “Quantum Cryptography: Public Key Distribution and Coin Tossing.” In Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Computers, Systems and Signal Processing, 175–79. Bangalore, India: 1984.
Bennett, Charles H., Gilles Brassard, Claude Crépeau, Richard Jozsa, Asher Peres, and William K. Wootters. “Teleporting an Unknown Quantum State Via Dual Classical and Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Channels.” Physical Review Letters 70 (1993): 1895.
Bennett, Charles H., and Rolf Landauer. “Fundamental Physical Limits of Computation.” Scientific American 253, no. 1 (1985): 48–56.
Bennett, Charles H., Ming Li, and Bin Ma. “Chain Letters and Evolutionary Histories.” Scientific American 288, no. 6 (June 2003): 76–81.
Benzer, Seymour. “The Elementary Units of Heredity.” In The Chemical Basis of Heredity, edited by W. D. McElroy and B. Glass, 70–93. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1957.
Berlinski, David. The Advent of the Algorithm: The Idea That Rules the World. New York: Harcourt, 2000.
Bernstein, Jeremy. The Analytical Engine: Computers—Past, Present and Future. New York: Random House, 1963.
Bikhchandani, Sushil, David Hirshleifer, and Ivo Welch. “A Theory of Fads, Fashion, Custom, and Cultural Change as Informational Cascades.” Journal of Political Economy 100, no. 5 (1992): 992–1026.
Blackmore, Susan. The Meme Machine. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Blair, Ann. “Reading Strategies for Coping with Information Overload ca. 1550–1700.” Journal of the History of Ideas 64, no. 1 (2003): 11–28.
Blohm, Hans, Stafford Beer, and David Suzuki. Pebbles to Computers: The Thread. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1986.
Boden, Margaret A. Mind as Machine: A History of Cognitive Science. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Bollobás, Béla, and Oliver Riordan. Percolation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Bolter, J. David. Turing’s Man: Western Culture in the Computer Age. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984.
Boole, George. “The Calculus of Logic.” Cambridge and Dublin Mathematical Journal 3 (1848): 183–98.
———. An Investigation of the Laws of Thought, on Which Are Founded the Mathematical Theories of Logic and Probabilities. London: Walton & Maberly, 1854.
———. Studies in Logic and Probability, vol. 1. La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1952.
Borges, Jorge Luis. Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings. New York: New Directions, 1962.
Bouwmeester, Dik, Jian-Wei Pan, Klaus Mattle, Manfred Eibl, Harald Weinfurter, and Anton Zeilinger. “Experimental Quantum Teleportation.” Nature 390 (11 December 1997): 575–79.
Bowden, B. V., ed. Faster Than Thought: A Symposium on Digital Computing Machines. New York: Pitman, 1953.