The Information - James Gleick [202]
On the contrary, the idea of perfection is contrary to the nature of language. Information theory has helped us understand that—or, if you are a pessimist, forced us to understand it. “We are forced to see,” Palmer continues,
that words are not themselves ideas, but merely strings of ink marks; we see that sounds are nothing more than waves. In a modern age without an Author looking down on us from heaven, language is not a thing of definite certainty, but infinite possibility; without the comforting illusion of meaningful order we have no choice but to stare into the face of meaningless disorder; without the feeling that meaning can be certain, we find ourselves overwhelmed by all the things that words might mean.
Infinite possibility is good, not bad. Meaningless disorder is to be challenged, not feared. Language maps a boundless world of objects and sensations and combinations onto a finite space. The world changes, always mixing the static with the ephemeral, and we know that language changes, not just from edition to edition of the Oxford English Dictionary but from one moment to the next, and from one person to the next. Everyone’s language is different. We can be overwhelmed or we can be emboldened.
More and more, the lexicon is in the network now—preserved, even as it changes; accessible and searchable. Likewise, human knowledge soaks into the network, into the cloud. The web sites, the blogs, the search engines and encyclopedias, the analysts of urban legends and the debunkers of the analysts. Everywhere, the true rubs shoulders with the false. No form of digital communication has earned more mockery than the service known as Twitter—banality shrink-wrapped, enforcing triviality by limiting all messages to 140 characters. The cartoonist Garry Trudeau twittered satirically in the guise of an imaginary newsman who could hardly look up from his twittering to gather any news. But then, eyewitness Twitter messages provided emergency information and comfort during terrorist attacks in Mumbai in 2008, and it was Twitter feeds from Tehran that made the Iranian protests visible to the world in 2009. The aphorism is a form with an honorable history. I barely twitter myself, but even this odd medium, microblogging so quirky and confined, has its uses and its enchantment. By 2010 Margaret Atwood, a master of a longer form, said she had been “sucked into the Twittersphere like Alice down the rabbit hole.”
Is it signaling, like telegraphs? Is it Zen poetry? Is it jokes scribbled on the washroom wall? Is it John Hearts Mary carved on a tree? Let’s just say it’s communication, and communication is something human beings like to do.♦
Shortly thereafter, the Library of Congress, having been founded to collect every book, decided to preserve every tweet, too. Possibly undignified, and probably redundant, but you never know. It is human communication.
And the network has learned a few things that no individual could ever know.
It identifies CDs of recorded music by looking at the lengths of their individual tracks and consulting a vast database, formed by accretion over years, by the shared contributions of millions of anonymous users. In 2007 this database revealed something that had eluded distinguished critics and listeners: that more than one hundred recordings released by the late English pianist Joyce Hatto—music by Chopin, Beethoven, Mozart, Liszt, and others—were actually stolen performances by other pianists. MIT established a Center for Collective Intelligence, devoted to finding group wisdom and “harnessing” it. It remains difficult to know when and how much to trust the wisdom of crowds—the title of a 2004 book by James Surowiecki, to be distinguished from the madness of crowds as chronicled in 1841 by Charles Mackay, who declared that people “go mad in herds, while they recover their senses slowly, and one by one.”♦ Crowds turn all too quickly into mobs, with their time-honored manifestations: manias, bubbles, lynch mobs, flash mobs, crusades, mass hysteria, herd mentality, goose-stepping, conformity,