When Kevin Kelly interviewed me about The Information for Wired, he asked me to define the word, and I was unprepared. I did some hemming and hawing (which he mercifully omitted). I see it continues to trouble him. Others have asked me the same question, and I continue to hem and haw. You might think I would have it figured out by now.

The problem of definition runs as a a minor thread throughout my book. The very idea that a word has a definition is surprisingly new—barely 400 years old. You might think it is obvious, but it is not. People managed to use words for millennia without worrying too much. John Locke felt it necessary to explain in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding:

Definition being nothing but making another understand by Words, what Idea the term defined stands for.

In the very first English dictionary, Robert Cawdrey’s Table Alphabeticall in 1604, we see that defining words is not so easy. I quote a few of my favorite Cawdrey definitions (in their entirety):

crocodile, [kind of] beast.
vapor, moisture, ayre, hote breath, or reaking.
theologie, divinitie, the science of living blessedly for ever.

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Many people, including some I greatly respect, are gleeful about the demise of the arduously worked out settlement of the lawsuits brought by the Authors Guild and book publishers against Google. Not me.

It certainly wasn’t perfect. It involved some messy compromises, as settlements tend to do. It couldn’t satisfy everyone.

In creating a vast and widely accessible digital library, bringing back to life many forgotten books, it seemed to give Google, a private corporation, too much power over what, in an ideal world, should be a public resource. (“Public” most emphatically not being a synonym for “free.”)

So now what? I fear that many people underestimate the difficulties that lie ahead. The New York Times editorial page does, and it botches the law by saying, “Google’s loss means that, for now, its search results will show only snippets of text from books that are under copyright but out of print.”

Quite the contrary. Judge Denny Chin stated clearly that Google was not entitled to copy these books onto its servers in the first place: “Google engaged in wholesale, blatant copying, without first obtaining copyright permissions.” The settlement would have authorized Google’s storage and search of the books. That is no longer permitted.

It’s going to be hard to find a way of letting Google keep its illicitly obtained copies and fairly compensate copyright holders, because, for one thing, there are so many of them.

We’re back to a messy real world now. Perhaps the stars are finally aligned for Congress to create a National Digital Library, assembling and preserving all these books, making them searchable, and sharing them with readers in a way that fairly compensates the rightsholders. This Congress seems pretty dysfunctional, but who knows? The settlement, now defunct, at least provides a well thought-out framework for how it might be done—with or without Google.

Poetry or doggerel? Oh, who cares. John Horgan has unearthed and now presents some verse written by Claude Shannon in 1981, at the height of the Rubik’s Cube craze. Shannon was, of course, the creator of what is now called information theory; he is the central figure in my new book, where I mention that he liked game-playing and never lost his childlike sense of fun.

Case in point: “A Rubric on Rubik Cubics.” Shannon includes footnotes, in the spirit, he says, of T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” He advises, “this may be either read as a poem or sung to ‘Ta! Ra! Ra! Boom De Yay!’ with an eight-bar chorus.” One of the verses turns (and this, too, is entirely characteristic) to the subject of human vs. machine intelligence:

The issue’s joined in steely grip:
Man’s mind against computer chip.
With theorems wrought by Conway’s eight
‘Gainst programs writ by Thistlethwait.
Can multibillion-neuron brains
Beat multimegabit machines?
The thrust of this theistic schism—
To ferret out God’s algorism!

For the whole poem, with footnotes, back story, and entertaining commentary, see Horgan’s Scientific American blog. (Horgan, coincidentally, reviewed The Information for the Wall Street Journal.)

I hope I’ll make it to the new Broadway production of Tom Stoppard’s masterpiece Arcadia. This play goes for my jugular. The heartbreaking, extraordinary Thomasina; Lord Byron lurking offstage; the garden and the wilderness; the carnal embrace in the gazebo. Stoppard says all there is to say about chaos and fractals better than I ever managed: “The ordinary-sized stuff which is our lives, the things people write poetry about—clouds—daffodils—waterfalls—and what happens in a cup of coffee when the cream goes in—these things are full of mystery, as mysterious to us as the heavens were to the Greeks.”

And I quote Arcadia all over again in The Information: the unexpected, wise response of Septimus to Thomasina’s grief over the ancient destruction of the Great Library of Alexandria (“All the lost plays of the Athenians!”):

We shed as we pick up, like travelers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again. You do not suppose, my lady, that if all of Archimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria, we would be at a loss for a corkscrew?

All the while, there is a place and a purpose for forgetting.

from the Google Labs Ngram Viewer

Originally the “Iron Age” was the most modern of the three ages in question (Stone, Bronze, Iron). The illustration above, produced via Google’s “Ngram Viewer,” gives a rough sense of the changing cultural awareness of these arbitrary, fictional “Ages.”

So, what about the Information Age? Several months ago I discussed the Oxford English Dictionary’s expanded entry for the word information. I called this dictionary entry a masterpiece and an adventure in cultural history in 9,400 words. I mentioned that when it came to the phrase “information age,” the OED attributed the first recorded usage to Richard Leghorn in 1960. Leghorn wrote:

Present and anticipated spectacular informational achievements will usher in public recognition of the “information age,” probably under a more symbolic title.

The OED gives this definition for information age:

the era in which the retrieval, management, and transmission of information, esp. by using computer technology, is a principal (commercial) activity.

Nineteen-sixty seems like a plausible starting point, but it’s not. It turns out Continue reading →

Is “publication date” a quaint-sounding concept? Never mind. It’s been eight years since the last one. From The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood:

In the beginning was the word, according to John. We are the species that named itself Homo sapiens, the one who knows—and then, after reflection, amended that to Homo sapiens sapiens. The greatest gift of Prometheus to humanity was not fire after all: “Numbers, too, chiefest of sciences, I invented for them, and the combining of letters, creative mother of the Muses’ arts, with which to hold all things in memory.” The alphabet was a founding technology of information. The telephone, the fax machine, the calculator, and, ultimately, the computer are only the latest innovations devised for saving, manipulating, and communicating knowledge. Our culture has absorbed a working vocabulary for these useful inventions. We speak of compressing data, aware that this is quite different from compressing a gas. We know about streaming information, parsing it, sorting it, matching it, and filtering it. Our furniture includes iPods and plasma displays, our skills include texting and Googling, we are endowed, we are expert, so we see information in the foreground. But it has always been there.

Kevin Kelly has been saying for some years that technological species, unlike biological ones, are more or less immortal. They never go extinct. A few people persist in using quill pens (wouldn’t you know, there are websites), and even more people still wear leather boots.

When he said that on NPR’s Morning Edition, he got an argument from the science correspondent Robert Krulwich.

Nothing? I asked. Brass helmets? Detachable shirt collars? Chariot wheels?
Nothing, he said.
Can’t be, I told him. Tools do hang around, but some must go extinct.

So they’ve been having a debate. Krulwich appealed to his readers and listeners, who are legion, for suggestions. It seems like an easy parlor game, at first blush. The cotton gin? The flint arrowhead? Betamax? But Kelly is not to be underestimated; he seems to know every remote tribesman and antique gadget enthusiast on earth. And now Krulwich has surrendered—sort of—in a deeply thoughtful blog post titled Tools Never Die, the Finale.

Some of the arguments on both sides hinge on matters of definition, which aren’t so interesting: for example, what qualifies as a species of technology. But the fundamental issue is profound and well worth our attention, and I’m not just saying that because Krulwich ends up quoting from The Information.

It may simply be that, as Krulwich puts it, “there are so many people on Earth with different incomes, traditions, religions, enthusiasms that so far, as a young species, we don’t need to throw anything away.” But it is also true that technology is memetic.

Inventions are memes. And memes may not be immortal, but they are surely long-lived.