The Information - James Gleick [199]
When new information technologies alter the existing landscape, they bring disruption: new channels and new dams rerouting the flow of irrigation and transport. The balance between creators and consumers is upset: writers and readers, speakers and listeners. Market forces are confused; information can seem too cheap and too expensive at the same time. The old ways of organizing knowledge no longer work. Who will search; who will filter? The disruption breeds hope mixed with fear. In the first days of radio Bertolt Brecht, hopeful, fearful, and quite obsessed, expressed this feeling aphoristically: “A man who has something to say and finds no listeners is bad off. Even worse off are listeners who can’t find anyone with something to say to them.”♦ The calculus always changes. Ask bloggers and tweeters: Which is worse, too many mouths or too many ears?
EPILOGUE
(The Return of Meaning)
It was inevitable that meaning would force its way back in.
—Jean-Pierre Dupuy (2000)♦
THE EXHAUSTION, the surfeit, the pressure of information have all been seen before. Credit Marshall McLuhan for this insight—his most essential—in 1962:
We are today as far into the electric age as the Elizabethans had advanced into the typographical and mechanical age. And we are experiencing the same confusions and indecisions which they had felt when living simultaneously in two contrasted forms of society and experience.♦
But as much as it is the same, this time it is different. We are a half century further along now and can begin to see how vast the scale and how strong the effects of connectedness.
Once again, as in the first days of the telegraph, we speak of the annihilation of space and time. For McLuhan this was prerequisite to the creation of global consciousness—global knowing. “Today,” he wrote, “we have extended our central nervous systems in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned. Rapidly, we approach the final phase of the extensions of man—the technological simulation of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society.”♦ Walt Whitman had said it better a century before:
What whispers are these O lands, running ahead of you, passing under the seas?
Are all nations communing? is there going to be but one heart to the globe?♦
The wiring of the world, followed hard upon by the spread of wireless communication, gave rise to romantic speculation about the birth of a new global organism. Even in the nineteenth century mystics and theologians began speaking of a shared mind or collective consciousness, formed through the collaboration of millions of people placed in communication with one another.♦
Some went so far as to view this new creature as a natural product of continuing evolution—a way for humans to fulfill their special destiny, after their egos had been bruised by Darwinism. “It becomes absolutely necessary,” wrote the French philosopher Édouard Le Roy in 1928, “to place [man] above the lower plane of nature, in a position which enables him to dominate it.”♦ How? By creating the “noosphere”—the sphere of mind—a climactic “mutation” in evolutionary history. His friend the Jesuit philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin did even more to promote the noosphere, which he called a “new skin” on the earth:
Does it not seem as though a great body is in the process of being born—with its limbs, its nervous system, its centers of perception, its memory—the very body of that great something to come which was to fulfill the aspirations that had been aroused in the reflective being by the freshly acquired consciousness of its interdependence with and responsibility for a whole in evolution?♦
That was a mouthful even in French, and less mystical spirits