Bits instead of atoms
Information is the symbolic representation of ideas and data that are exchanged between or within systems, and which influences the behaviors of those systems. Raw data must be put in context o have meaning. The languages or constructs that we use for the recording and transmission of these exchanges has emerged and been discovered in many forms - transistors, storage devices, and even the genome. The growth in the availability and exchange of information across our society is staggering.
Consider IBM's RAMAC 350 Disk Storage unit, introduced in 1956, and which is shown here being loaded into an airplane for transportation. These devices were only able to store the equivalent of 2 mp3 files that we now download wirelessly on a whim; yet at the time of RAMAC's introduction, it's customers were leasing these units for over $3200 per month. Moore's law has thus been dwarfed by Kryder's law, and leaves the explosion and acceleration of communications networks in the dust. These improvements have been driven by our incessant appetite for more information, and the interplay between commodity hardware and protocol standards. Their gift to us is an ever-decreasing cost of transporting these bits instead of atoms... but comes with the ever challenging obligation to make sense of the growing accumulation of these bits with time.
James Gleick's new book, The Information Flood, puts this explosion of storage capability into a broader context, by helping us to understand what information is and how our usage of it has been changing over time:
Gleick introduces us to the theory of information gradually, as he shapes our understanding through many different observational lenses, and leads us to a more formal definition
We are swimming upstream against a great torrent of disorganization, which tends to reduce everything to the heat death of equilibrium and sameness.… This heat death in physics has a counterpart in the ethics of Kierkegaard, who pointed out that we live in a chaotic moral universe. In this, our main obligation is to establish arbitrary enclaves of order and system.… Like the Red Queen, we cannot stay where we are without running as fast as we can...
Not only do living things lessen the disorder in their environments; they are in themselves, their skeletons and their flesh, vesicles and membranes, shells and carapaces, leaves and blossoms, circulatory systems and metabolic pathways—miracles of pattern and structure...
Viewed as material by one inquirer, as spiritual by another, and by others as mysteriously compounded as both, the human mind escapes from the cognisance of sense and reason, and lies, a waste field with a northern exposure, upon which every passing speculator casts his mental tares.
[Information] is a measure of surprise. Put yet another way, it the average number of yes-no questions needed to guess the unknown message.
In this journey, Gleick chronicles the grasp of information as a concept, and the evolution of mediums we have used to transmit, store, and use it:
The 1970s were the decade of megabytes. In the summer of 1970, IBM introduced two new computer models with more memory than ever before: the Model 155, with 768,000 bytes of memory, and the larger Model 165, with a full megabyte, in a large cabinet. One of these room-filling mainframes could be purchased for $4,674,160. By 1982 Prime Computer was marketing a megabyte of memory on a single circuit board, for $36,000. When the publishers of the Oxford English Dictionary began digitizing its contents in 1987 (120 typists; an IBM mainframe), they estimated its size at a gigabyte. A gigabyte also encompasses the entire human genome. A thousand of those would fill a terabyte. A terabyte was the amount of disk storage Larry Page and Sergey Brin managed to patch together with the help of $15,000 spread across their personal credit cards in 1998, when they were Stanford graduate students building a search-engine prototype, which they first called BackRub and then renamed Google. A terabyte is how much data a typical analog television station broadcasts daily, and it was the size of the United States government’s database of patent and trademark records when it went online in 1998. By 2010, one could buy a terabyte disc drive for a hundred dollars and hold it in the palm of one hand. The books in the Library of Congress represent about 10 terabytes (as Shannon guessed), and the number is many times more when images and recording music are counted. The library now archives web sites; by February 2010 it had collected 160 terabytes’ worth.
It is easy to forget the economic and ecological improvements this journey has meant: if an Apple MacAir computer was as inefficient as a 1991 computer, it's battery life would only last 3 seconds, and a book downloaded on a Kindle is nearly weightless.
In tracing this evolution over time, Gleick chronicles the many key breakthroughs and personalities which have produced these changes, including Samuel Morse, Ada Byron, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon, Norbert Wiener, and Alan Turing. We learn of the beats of tribal drums in Africa, through the short-lived infrastructure deployed for telegraphy and telephony, across the revolutions brought by digital computers, into the basis of life itself, and finally, to the conceptualization of memes that are distinct from any physical representations:
Memes emerge in brains and travel outward, establishing beachheads on paper and celluloid and silicon and anywhere else information can go. They are not to be thought of as elementary particles but as organisms. The number three is not a meme; nor is the color blue, nor any simple thought, any more than a single nucleotide can be a gene. Memes are complex units, distinct and memorable—units with staying power. Also, an object is not a meme. The hula hoop is not a meme; it is made of plastic, not of bits. When this species of toy spread worldwide in a mad epidemic in 1958, it was the product, the physical manifestation of a meme, or memes: the craving for hula hoops...
Ideas cause ideas and help evolve new ideas. They interact with each other and with other mental forces in the same brain, in neighboring brains, and thanks to global communication, in far distant, foreign brains. And they also interact with the external surroundings to produce in toto a burstwise advance in evolution that is far beyond anything to hit the evolutionary scene yet.
Make no mistake; this is not a book about Information Systems or Information Technology, as these are merely media and protocols in the context of this work, just a more sophisticated version of Morse code, smoke signals, or tribal drums. Gleick thus presents people and societies as information systems and technologies. This is a book that delivers on the promise presented in its title, providing an autobiography of information, and covering both its history and our progressive understanding of its theoretical foundations. It helps us grasp the flood of this information we must now attempt to make sense of and deal with as businesses and societies. Along the way, one is struck by being a part of an evolutionary march towards self-awareness:
We sort the mail, build sand castles, solve jigsaw puzzles, separate wheat from chaff, rearrange chess pieces, collect stamps, alphabetize books, create symmetry, compose sonnets and sonatas, and put our rooms in order, and to do all this requires no great energy, as long as we can apply intelligence. We propagate structure (not just we humans but we who are alive). We disturb the tendency toward equilibrium. It would be absurd to attempt a thermodynamic accounting for such processes, but it is not absurd to say we are reducing entropy, piece by piece. Bit by bit.
Yet despite this march, we are left to reflect on how our records of history shape our perceptions and intentions for the future
“This may not be what George Washington looked like then,” a tour guide was overheard saying of the Gilbert Stuart painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, “but this is what he looks like now.”
As T. S. Elliot says, "Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?" Only the records we capture and the representations we create of our times will shape the future understanding of other generations.
