Book Report: The Information - James Gleick
This monster of a book has come out amidst a wave of other information- & internet-related publications, all of which seem to be getting a great deal of attention in the media. It seems obvious to me that books ought to be written in this area, but the high attention tells me that
Let me elaborate.
INFORMATION IS DIFFERENCE
Imagine you’re listening carefully in the jungles of Ghana to a message coming through the air. At any moment, you are assembling the meaning of the message based on a high-or-low pitch. BEFORE you hear it, there’s a possibility of the next one being either pitch. AFTER you hear it, one has been chosen, and one has not. This elimination of possibilities, this difference, is INFORMATION.
Information isn’t a tangible thing. It’s what the music is to a score. It is the dance, but not the dancer. The very words you’re reading right now are information because in the realm of possible words, I’ve reduced options, and that reduction is INFORMATION.
To bring the uncertain into the certain, to create DIFFERENCE between what has been chosen and the possibilities of what might be chosen, this is information.
MORE SYMBOLS = MORE MEANING
Let’s return to the example of the African drummers: there are two possible messages on those drums. If we include silence, we can say there is another two-message system: either sound or silence. If we consider silence the default condition of nature (as in: the lack of drums), then as soon as silence is broken there is difference, and there is information. Then within this information, there are the previously mentioned two pitches.
That means the possibility for communication is stating either ‘this’ or ‘that’. A combination of this’s & that’s lead to still more information, because those strings further limit possibilities, and result in refined information. This may strike you as familiar, and it should. The two pitches of the drums is essentially the same system the computer on which you’re reading this is bringing you these very words. Instead of high-or-low, it’s 0-or-1. The idea is the same: this or that; once this, not that, and once that, not this.
Now, in all of nature’s infinite glory, a pretty dull picture is drawn if there’s only the possibility of splitting things into 2. That means that a long string of this binary information is required to even communicate the most basic messages.
For example, here is this exact sentence in binary code:
01000110 01101111 01110010 00100000 01100101 01111000 01100001 01101101 01110000 01101100 01100101 00101100 00100000 01101000 01100101 01110010 01100101 00100000 01101001 01110011 00100000 01110100 01101000 01101001 01110011 00100000 01100101 01111000 01100001 01100011 01110100 00100000 01110011 01100101 01101110 01110100 01100101 01101110 01100011 01100101 00100000 01101001 01101110 00100000 01100010 01101001 01101110 01100001 01110010 01111001 00100000 01100011 01101111 01100100 01100101 00111010.
Pretty long-winded for a 10-word sentence, eh?
On the flip side, the more symbols any language has, the FEWER symbols are required to convey a message.
Chinese is a great example, with over 80 000 characters. Many concepts can be delivered with only a single ideogram. Far more efficient, but impossible to transmit with a drum that can play only two pitches.
You may sense where this is going. In the interest of TRANSMISSION, low information symbols are desirable. The telegraph was the Western version of the African talking drums, with its 2-state system of either a short-or-long dash (and of course, silence). Today with email, skype, and all the other fanciness through which we communicate, great amounts of information can be transmitted around the globe because it is turned into a stream of 0’s & 1’s, and then re-converted when it arrives at our end, just like a telegraph message was converted to dots and dashes for transmission, and then re-converted for the recipient.
A lot of the choice of system rests on DISEMBODIED TRANSMISSION, or maybe we can even say TELEPORTATION. What I mean is that even with the telegraph, the CONTENT of the message became separated from the physical piece of paper on which it was written. Gleick relates some funny stories of people going into telegraph offices in the 19th century with parcels they wished to ‘telegraph’ to distant loved ones.
Apparently it took some time for people to separate the content from the medium. The philosopher Marshall McLuhan eventually thrived on explaining the significance of this distinction, but up to the point of the telegraph, the two were inseparable.
In the interest of teleportation, then, when the actual medium isn’t sent but only the content, then a low-information system makes a whole lot of sense so that only two signals can be sent through electrical wires, rather than 80 000. Remember, information is differentiation, and if any information is hoped to be sent, then there must be the possibility of all the characters being sent, so that when one arrives, the operator knows that 1 has been chosen and 79 999 have not.
ONE FINAL THOUGHT: TIME, INFORMATION & DIFFERENCE
Dig this.
Your subjective experience of time has to do with the amount of information you experience. What does that mean?
Information is difference. Think of your experience on your route to a place you’ve never been before. Or your first day at a new job. There are tons of things DIFFERENT than what you’re used to, and it seems to take a whole lot longer.
As you keep going down that route, or you keep going to that job, many of the things which were new at first are now very regular, and you hardly even notice them. There is little—if any—difference.
And what do you experience as a result? Time seems to fly by.
Here’s Jordan’s recipe for time travel: if you want to slow time down, seek new experiences. Seek DIFFERENCE. The more difference you experience, the more information you receive, and the more information you receive, the slower time moves.
Time is information.
Information is difference.
So time is difference.
This monster of a book has come out amidst a wave of other information- & internet-related publications, all of which seem to be getting a great deal of attention in the media. It seems obvious to me that books ought to be written in this area, but the high attention tells me that
- people are growing concerned about the spread of consumer technologies & the ubiquity of the internet
- people are not thinking about these subjects as much as I believe, so any book written in the area seems a novel breakthrough by a person who must have prophetic insight.
Does James Gleick have this prophetic insight? To be fair, the full title is The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood. Recognizing his historical agenda, there isn’t so much prophecy involved in his endeavour. He goes into painful detail at times, and often I questioned the necessity of many of the chapters, and how they hung together. At times it seemed more a survey of various topics than a clear narrative. In the words of Antoine de Saint Exupery (authour of The Little Prince) “Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” After spending many, many hours pushing through Gleick’s book, I suggest that by Saint Exupery’s standards, the book is not quite perfect.
The book’s thesis suggests that history is the process of information gradually becoming aware of itself. In the words of The Dude, “that’s fuckin’ interesting . . .” Only, I hardly have the sense how Gleick followed that thesis up. There are all sorts of histories of communication and mathematics and how they abstract and simplify the world around us, but any sense of how information is becoming aware of itself is left to the reader to piece together.
There are two main ideas I’ve taken away from this book.
- Information is difference
- The more possible symbols in a language, the greater the information in any single symbol
Let me elaborate.
INFORMATION IS DIFFERENCE
Gleick begins the book by exploring African drumming as a mode of communication. Despite European colonizers’ claims of ‘savagery’, it turns out that Africans had one of the most advanced communication systems of their time. Drummers could choose between two different sounds—a high pitch and a low pitch (and of course, silence)—and communicate over many kilometres, nearly instantly.
Imagine you’re listening carefully in the jungles of Ghana to a message coming through the air. At any moment, you are assembling the meaning of the message based on a high-or-low pitch. BEFORE you hear it, there’s a possibility of the next one being either pitch. AFTER you hear it, one has been chosen, and one has not. This elimination of possibilities, this difference, is INFORMATION.
Information isn’t a tangible thing. It’s what the music is to a score. It is the dance, but not the dancer. The very words you’re reading right now are information because in the realm of possible words, I’ve reduced options, and that reduction is INFORMATION.
To bring the uncertain into the certain, to create DIFFERENCE between what has been chosen and the possibilities of what might be chosen, this is information.
MORE SYMBOLS = MORE MEANING
Let’s return to the example of the African drummers: there are two possible messages on those drums. If we include silence, we can say there is another two-message system: either sound or silence. If we consider silence the default condition of nature (as in: the lack of drums), then as soon as silence is broken there is difference, and there is information. Then within this information, there are the previously mentioned two pitches.
That means the possibility for communication is stating either ‘this’ or ‘that’. A combination of this’s & that’s lead to still more information, because those strings further limit possibilities, and result in refined information. This may strike you as familiar, and it should. The two pitches of the drums is essentially the same system the computer on which you’re reading this is bringing you these very words. Instead of high-or-low, it’s 0-or-1. The idea is the same: this or that; once this, not that, and once that, not this.
Now, in all of nature’s infinite glory, a pretty dull picture is drawn if there’s only the possibility of splitting things into 2. That means that a long string of this binary information is required to even communicate the most basic messages.
For example, here is this exact sentence in binary code:
01000110 01101111 01110010 00100000 01100101 01111000 01100001 01101101 01110000 01101100 01100101 00101100 00100000 01101000 01100101 01110010 01100101 00100000 01101001 01110011 00100000 01110100 01101000 01101001 01110011 00100000 01100101 01111000 01100001 01100011 01110100 00100000 01110011 01100101 01101110 01110100 01100101 01101110 01100011 01100101 00100000 01101001 01101110 00100000 01100010 01101001 01101110 01100001 01110010 01111001 00100000 01100011 01101111 01100100 01100101 00111010.
Pretty long-winded for a 10-word sentence, eh?
On the flip side, the more symbols any language has, the FEWER symbols are required to convey a message.
 |
| Meaning: justice, honesty, loyalty, righteousness, reliability |
Chinese is a great example, with over 80 000 characters. Many concepts can be delivered with only a single ideogram. Far more efficient, but impossible to transmit with a drum that can play only two pitches.
You may sense where this is going. In the interest of TRANSMISSION, low information symbols are desirable. The telegraph was the Western version of the African talking drums, with its 2-state system of either a short-or-long dash (and of course, silence). Today with email, skype, and all the other fanciness through which we communicate, great amounts of information can be transmitted around the globe because it is turned into a stream of 0’s & 1’s, and then re-converted when it arrives at our end, just like a telegraph message was converted to dots and dashes for transmission, and then re-converted for the recipient.
A lot of the choice of system rests on DISEMBODIED TRANSMISSION, or maybe we can even say TELEPORTATION. What I mean is that even with the telegraph, the CONTENT of the message became separated from the physical piece of paper on which it was written. Gleick relates some funny stories of people going into telegraph offices in the 19th century with parcels they wished to ‘telegraph’ to distant loved ones.
Apparently it took some time for people to separate the content from the medium. The philosopher Marshall McLuhan eventually thrived on explaining the significance of this distinction, but up to the point of the telegraph, the two were inseparable.
In the interest of teleportation, then, when the actual medium isn’t sent but only the content, then a low-information system makes a whole lot of sense so that only two signals can be sent through electrical wires, rather than 80 000. Remember, information is differentiation, and if any information is hoped to be sent, then there must be the possibility of all the characters being sent, so that when one arrives, the operator knows that 1 has been chosen and 79 999 have not.
ONE FINAL THOUGHT: TIME, INFORMATION & DIFFERENCE
Dig this.
Your subjective experience of time has to do with the amount of information you experience. What does that mean?
Information is difference. Think of your experience on your route to a place you’ve never been before. Or your first day at a new job. There are tons of things DIFFERENT than what you’re used to, and it seems to take a whole lot longer.
As you keep going down that route, or you keep going to that job, many of the things which were new at first are now very regular, and you hardly even notice them. There is little—if any—difference.
And what do you experience as a result? Time seems to fly by.
Here’s Jordan’s recipe for time travel: if you want to slow time down, seek new experiences. Seek DIFFERENCE. The more difference you experience, the more information you receive, and the more information you receive, the slower time moves.
Time is information.
Information is difference.
So time is difference.
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