A series of information explosions

As usual, microbes led the way. Bacteria have swarmed in intense
networks for 3.5 billion years. Then a hierarchical form emerged
with the first nucleated cells which were made up of an enclosed
society of formerly independent organisms.

That’s the pattern for the evolution of information, Alex Wright
said. Networks coalesce into heirarchies, which then form a new
level of networks, which coalesce again, and so on. Thus an unending
series of information explosions is finessed.

In humans, classification schemes emerged everywhere, defining how
things are connected in larger contexts. Researchers into “folk
taxonomies” have found that all cultures universally describe things
they care about in hierarchical layers, and those hierarchies are
usually five layers deep.

Family tree hierarchies were accorded to the gods, who were
human-like personalities but also represented various natural forces.

Starting 30,000 years ago the “ice age information explosion” brought
the transition to collaborative big game hunting, cave paintings, and
elaborate decorative jewelry that carried status information. It was
the beginning of information’s “release from social proximity.”

5,000 years ago in Sumer, accountants began the process toward
writing, beginning with numbers, then labels and lists, which enabled
bureaucracy. Scribes were just below kings in prestige. Finally
came written narratives such as Gilgamesh.

The move from oral culture to literate culture is profound. Oral is
additive, aggregative, participatory, and situational, where literate
is subordinate, analytic, objective, and abstract. (One phenomenon
of current Net culture is re-emergence of oral forms in email,
twittering, YouTube, etc.)

Wright honored the sequence of information-ordering visionaries who
brought us to our present state. In 1883 Charles Cutter devised a
classification scheme that led in part to the Library of Congress
system and devised an apparatus of keyboard and wires that would
fetch the desired book. H.G. Wells proposed a “world brain” of data
and imagined that it would one day wake up. Teilhard de Chardin
anticipated an “etherization of human consciousness” into a global
noosphere.

The greatest unknown revolutionary was the Belgian Paul Otlet. In
1895 he set about freeing the information in books from their
bindings. He built a universal decimal classification and then
figured out how that organized data could be explored, via “links”
and a “web.” In 1910 Otlet created a “radiated library” called the
Mundameum in Brussels that managed search queries in a massive way
until the Nazis destroyed the service. Alex Wright showed an
astonishing video of how Otlet’s distributed telephone-plus-screen
sysem worked .

Wright concluded with the contributions of Vannevar Bush
(”associative trails” in his Memex system), Eugene Garfield’s Science
Citation Index, the predecessor of page ranking. Doug Engelbart’s
working hypertext system in the “mother of all demos.” And Ted
Nelson who helped inspire Engelbart and Berners-Lee and who Wright
considers “directly responsible for the generation of the World Wide
Web.”

–Stewart Brand

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This entry was posted on Sunday, August 19th, 2007 at 8:35 am and is filed under Seminars. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.