• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 278 0

some concepts that would be helpful to electrical engineers working for the telephone company. As used by Shannon, the word is no longer tied to the semantic content of utterances as grasped by sender and receiver; “information” in the new usage refers to the transmission of meaning rather than meaning itself, and it is quantitative, “a measure of the difficulty in transmitting the sequences produced by some information source” (according to Warren Weaver, “The Mathematics of Communication,” Scientific American [July 1949], p. 12, as cited by Theodore Roszak, The Cult of Information: A Neo-Luddite Treatise on High Tech, Artificial Intelligence, and the True Art of Thinking [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994], p. 12). In the new usage, “even gibberish might be ‘information’ if somebody cared to transmit it,” as Roszak writes. Shannon’s appropriation of the common word “information” for this purpose has led to all manner of confusion, and infected our common use of the word in such a way that one must make an extra effort to preserve the idea of meaning if that is what one intends. The net effect is to embolden our native tendency to intellectual leveling, and make it seem somehow in harmony with technological progress.

6 Alexis de Tocqueville wrote,

Men of democratic centuries like general ideas because they exempt them from studying particular cases; they contain, if I can express myself so, many things in a small volume and give out a large product in a little time. When, therefore, after an inattentive and brief examination, they believe they perceive a common relation among certain objects, they do not push their research further, and without examining in detail how these various objects resemble each other or differ, they hasten to arrange them under the same formula in order to get past them (Democracy in America, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000], p.414).

Trying to get past things with haste is incompatible with dwelling in things and giving them their due. But Tocqueville also suggests that the kind of attention demanded by practical involvement can serve as a corrective to this tendency. General ideas appeal to people “only in matters that are not habitual and necessary objects of their thoughts” (ibid., p. 416). Further, “those in commerce will readily seize all the general ideas one presents to them relative to philosophy, politics, the sciences, and the arts without looking at them closely; but they will entertain those that have reference to commerce only after examination and will accept them only with reservation” (ibid.). This statement requires a crucial qualification in our day. In Tocqueville’s era there was no such thing as commerce without practical involvement and the kind of attention it demands, whereas in our time the separation of thinking from doing has disburdened the commercial officer class of such attention, and made it more susceptible to general ideas.

7 Among the “promising personality characteristics” listed in a current textbook of organizational psychology is “tolerance for contradiction.” Frank J. Landy and Jeffrey M. Conte, Work in the 21st Century: An Introduction to Industrial and Organizational Psychology, 2nd ed. (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), p. 102.

8 In fact, I think this theoretical ideal of monopoly behavior posits more omniscience than many businesses really possess. Demand-side feedback is provided quickly in a supermarket. But when your customer is an institution, such as a library, there are unique rigidities on the demand side. How does a library solicit the expression of disgust from patrons? Instead the InfoTrac terminal simply sits unused.

9 Craig Calhoun, “Why Do Bad Careers Happen to Good Managers?” Contemporary Sociology 18, no. 4 (July 1989), p. 543. My account of Jackall’s findings is heavily indebted to this review.

10 Robert Jackall, Moral Mazes: The World of Corporate Managers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 136.

11 Ibid.

12 Ibid.

13 Ibid., p. 105.