Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages

  • Alex Wright
Joseph Henry Press: 2007. 296 pp. £16.99, $27.950309102383 | ISBN: 0-309-10238-3

'Information overload' is a phenomenon we know well — a Google search on the term retrieves close to 2 million hits. But is it really as new as we think? “We are not the first generation — nor even the first species — to wrestle with the problem of information overload,” Alex Wright reminds us in his ambitious new book, Glut. He seeks a balanced and historically informed assessment of the digital revolution's impact. As a former librarian now working as an information architect, Wright combines insights from his areas of expertise with a wide range of historical and scientific literature aimed at non-specialist audiences. He does not attempt a synthesis of specialist debate, but offers a well-informed account of information management across a surprising range of examples.

Many information management techniques were first developed in libraries, where hierarchical classification methods have existed for centuries. Credit: N. STRAUSS/AKG IMAGES

Information management systems, which typically rely on a combination of self-organizing networks and hierarchical relationships, are central to biological phenomena — from the evolution of multicellular organisms to the dynamics of social insects. Wright draws from sociobiology the suggestion that evolution has favoured the development of particular human cognitive behaviours in managing information, such as the drive to classify and the emotional attachment to symbols. He turns for confirmation to anthropologist Donald Brown's notion of human universals and notes the particular importance of the ice age that began some 40,000 years ago in forcing humans to interact more closely, thus stimulating the development of drawing and symbolic objects. Wright argues that this “ice age information explosion brought humanity to the brink of literacy”.

The book's central chapters follow a more conventional selection of examples spanning the development of Western civilization: from the origins of writing in Mesopotamia for keeping commerce and administration records, to the accumulation of books and bibliographic records (at Alexandria, for example), through the Dark Ages in which Irish scribes worked alone outside traditional hierarchies (like today's bloggers, Wright suggests), and into the age of print in the Renaissance.

The author discusses some high points of early modern information management. For example, Giulio Camillo's memory theatre (around 1550) promised access to all knowledge through a system of visual mnemonic cues; in 1751, the Encyclopédie of Diderot and d'Alembert established the modern norm for the encyclopaedia as an alphabetized, multiauthor, multivolume and illustrated reference work; and at about the same time, Carl Linnaeus devised a precise set of rules for classification in nature. Wright pays special attention to the methods for classifying books between the late seventeenth and early twentieth centuries, which culminated in the development of multi-tiered, expandable hierarchies of standardized headings, such as Melvil Dewey's decimal classification in the late nineteenth century. He points out that libraries and librarians have long been at the forefront of information management techniques.

Finally, Wright considers twentieth-century attempts to form a universal collection of retrievable information, many of which are now forgotten, although their original ambitions are partially realized in the World Wide Web. Paul Otlet, for example, was a Belgian bibliographer who dreamed of guiding users not just to the right books, but to their contents. His Mundaneum (1910) eventually consisted of more than 12 million facts kept on index cards to which users could submit queries for a fee. The American engineer Vannevar Bush envisioned a machine called the 'memex', which would retrieve information to match a query from texts stored on microfilm. Although Bush's article 'As we may think' (Atlantic Monthly, 1945) is considered seminal today, Wright notes how little current information science has heeded Bush's call for biological as well as mathematical models in computer science or his concerns about the influence of corporations on the growth of the field. Wright shows more generally how the Internet has developed beyond the control or the approval of its early contributors (such as Tim Berners-Lee or Ted Nelson, the conceptual father of hypertext).

The historical perspective of Glut is admirable: Wright neither assumes a linear progress nor makes unwarranted claims about the novelty or the indebtedness of current technologies to earlier ones. He doesn't try to predict what the lasting impacts of the Web will be, but notes that the Internet facilitates the formation of small, self-organized communities that have the potential to undermine large hierarchical structures. In this way, he suggests that human culture may no longer be moving unidirectionally as was once thought, towards coalescence into larger entities, but rather multidirectionally. Wright clearly values the growth of grassroots self-organization on the Web, but also acknowledges that bottom-up networks can benefit from some hierarchical structure.

One pay-off of attending to earlier ambitions for information control is to highlight some of the weaknesses of our current system. Wright notes, for example, that our search algorithms and the metadata they create are not transparent but are the work of software engineers operating within a world of commercial secrecy; and our weblinks that carry information about intellectual associations are evanescent and can disappear without leaving a trace. Using the analogy of print's arrival in the mid-fifteenth century, Wright warns of the potential for new technologies to seriously disrupt established structures. However, his interpretation that printing caused the Protestant Reformation is overly reductionist.

Wright's conclusion that “as Internet users continue to congregate in small groups, such behavior harkens back to our deepest rooted social instincts” is less convincing. This type of hasty sociobiological generalization argues from evidence selected to suit its purposes, without weighing counterevidence or other contributing factors. That humans have evolved a desire to communicate and form social groups does not strike me as the most helpful explanation for the complex choices we make among the many means of communication now at our disposal. Indeed, Wright shows throughout his book how the tools that were developed in different historical contexts to cope with information overload continue to shape our options and ambitions today.

This stimulating book offers much opportunity to reflect on the nature and long history of information management as a damper to the panic or the elation we may variously feel as we face ever greater scales of information overload.