The race who forgot everything

April 10, 2004 at 7:45 am · Filed under Uncategorized

I’ve been thinking, this morning. Always a dangerous proposition.

I’d like to revisit discussions of information overload and our cultural responses to it again, but this time in a much more quirky, wandering way.

Which is salient.

Forewarned is forearmed.

My wife and I have been posting articles and essays and some poetry gleaned from the local newspapers and magazines of a century ago, starting… well, starting in 1996, but we’ve recently picked up the pace because of this lovely content management system we now have at our fingertips. It’s a pleasant hobby, though looking at the web server log files, I’m not sure many folks get why.

Having only yesterday heard Barbara muttering “fascinating…” to herself as she re-typeset an old newspaper advertisement for something or other, I’m certain that her pleasure is much as mine — sufficient pleasure, in my case, that I dubbed our little whistling-in-the-dark hobby with the self-important label “nanohistory.”

I think the best way to describe the feeling of delight is: the thrill of discovery in the web of implication.

We don’t hike so much these days (and even when we did it was generally along well-trodden paths frequented by the most mundane of tourists), and we have never camped or spent time in remote parts of the world, so we don’t get to explore wilderness of that kind. Neither do we have much chance to do archaeological work, nor mad science-scale inventing, nor discovering new species in drops of water in our back yards. But we make do.

Instead, this is the trace of one of our recent forays into the nano-scale historical network: When we were living in Hanover, PA, we learned the pleasure of going to estate auctions. One estate auction we particularly enjoyed was that of an English professor at York College. One of the car-load of books we bought there (for $100 or so, total) was Lalla Rookh by Thomas Moore, which belonged to his wife (or mother?) Clara Moul. This exotic-sounding and beautifully-bound volume entered our collection, unread, where it sat unremarked for several years. In 1997 or so I came across a number of articles in the microfilms of a local newspaper, all entitled “Lalla Rookh”. Not reading them too closely, I printed them and bagged them with the rest for future transcription. This week, Barbara is transcribing them, and it turns out (as I follow her account) that they are announcements of a Pyrotechnic Extravaganza celebrating the completion of The Detroit Railway —- pyrotechnics having something (perhaps an orientale theme) to do with the best-selling book Lalla Rookh. The Pyrotechnics (provided my a Mr. Pain) were to be held at Boulevard Park in Detroit. Boulevard Park is gone, perhaps replaced or over-paved by Tigers Stadium. Oddly enough, when we were driving (on a lark) to the casino Thursday, we passed a local delivery truck labeled “Pain”, and from the parking structure at the Motor City Casino one has a good view of the devastated ground and lost neighborhoods surrounding Comerica Park, where Tigers Stadium used to sit….

I could move on from there, of course, but you get the picture. I have not mentioned the side-branches which lead from The Detroit Railway to the Electric Road which used to pass from Ann Arbor to Detroit one block from our house, to the days of ubiquitous trolleys, to the afternoon we visited the local historian and discovered that a block away in another direction is a pair of developments built between 1890 and 1900 (to cash in on the Electric Road as modern developers in Chelsea cash in on the presence of the Interstates?), to the SLUCE Project at the University of Michigan… and onwards. Or the other path that leads in the direction of the Pain family, among whom one would imagine a pyrotechnician worthy of celebrating a railroad’s completion with an ornate oriental flair could be easy to spot.

You will learn nothing of this by Googling. Well, until now, that is.

This is not History, as it is taught at least. Nor is it even microhistory, which is an approach used by professional vetted Historians to seek insights in the historical dynamics of a place or family or village. No, this nanohistory is the meandering flow of ephemeral implication and association that makes up our personal and family histories. Not even the things that one would hear in stories told at family reunions or in interviews for “oral history projects”, but rather the stuff the respondent knows so peripherally that they would have to be reminded of it.

And for the most part it’s gone. The physical remnants exist, but the associations and tacit knowledge and memories that linked them are gone. Metadata. I suppose what I’m talking about is metadata.

The next time somebody hands you a photo album, or makes you sit and watch a slide show (whether it’s on a wall or a monitor, family photographs or a research paper), imagine what a viewer might make of it in a century, when the people are dead, and the people telling you what the pictures represent are dead, and the words refer to things that no longer exist. I sell photographs of people who died before 1880, which were removed from the family albums and were never labeled. Who will ever know the names of the people they portray? We can see the clothing and manner, can guess the town in which they lived (for example if the photographer advertised on the reverse), can opine about the commercialization of photography in the 19th Century, but the links between these particular physical artifacts and the people and their personal cultures are gone forever.

Consider the shadows that might be cast by the forest of family trees, just five or six generations back, on the people you now know. Many of them are your relatives — do you know which? The people exist, but the links between them are very effectively lost.

Find a magazine of the 1940s, open it to the back section with the ads, and think about how many of those items being sold are still feasible components of our material culture, let alone desirable or noteworthy. A garter belt? A magnetic healing bracelet? The Rosicrucians? All the things exist still today, but how they were used and perceived and why they were important has changed utterly.

Is this massive loss of context a bad thing?

No, of course not. It might be said that we learn by forgetting, by filtering, by psychic (and physical) apoptosis. Surely we would be inundated not merely by facts and artifacts if we didn’t lose them outright, but the combinatorial explosion would be terrifying if we also kept a record of what everything meant. Things mean something in the context of a personal and cultural experience, and in relation to other things. Semiotic wiring would be laying around everywhere in tangles; we’d be tripping over it all the time….

But it can be fun. And enlightening.

The written works of Peter Ackroyd (especially in Albion and London: The Biography) and Nicholson Baker come to mind as good examples of the power of this approach. Chares Fort, of course. There are others. Many.

I’m not too sure how many. Let’s think about that a minute.

In context

Here we live, in a world arguably inundated by “too much information”. What is often implied is “too much new to learn”. Yet very few of us attend to the mounting pile of rubbish left behind — to families, neighborhoods, lost cultures and languages, the popular culture of foreign countries in distant times, the history of 19th-century itinerant photographers in Iowa. All that stuff still counts as information, immensely over-weighing the new stuff in the information overload tally.

But nobody complains about that, do they? If they complain about needing to know stuff about the past, it’s inevitably the big stuff — history stuff. Wars and presidents and the Party Line on Progress, and all that. Nothing about Pain the Pyrotechnician, nor memorizing Lalla Rookh, nor reading the Book of the Month Club volumes from 1950, nor identifying people mentioned in passing in old newspaper articles.

Yup, anxiety about information overload seems to be extremely forward-looking. Nobody seems to be anxious about the past.

A word on science and collecting

The deep and warming delight I experience in tracing these miniscule courses of implication is exactly the feeling I get when I’m working (successfully) on scientific research — especially complex systems, probability theory and graph theory, which I specifically love because they can give me this feeling. And when I read a particularly inspiring programming language manual, and see what I can do, where I can go with it. And when I discover a new addition to the few things I actually collect (as opposed to the many items I tend to accumulate). It is not the sense of pleasure when one achieves other goals, at least in my experience. It’s not a sense of domination or power; certainly not one of relief, since implication leads to implication forever. Perhaps it’s the thrill of the explorer, or the theologian, or the earnest science fiction fan — but I wouldn’t know that. Alas, I come to believe it is a personal thing, a you had to be there thing.

That may even be part of the pleasure. Would it be so delightful if I had published a book of detailed history and extraordinary scholarship in an esoteric domain? As one of the few hundred people who personally own that book (and as somebody who broke into a immensely self-satisfied grin when I found it in an estate sale last summer), I am thankful to the author for his troubles… but on reflection I’m not sure I’m that driven. Mysteriously pleased as I am to own it, I wouldn’t write such a thing. What a thankless job that would be.

Hmmm… interesting that I say I’m not “driven”. A word oft used to describe these obsessive encyclopedists (Fort, Baker, Ackroyd again; not necessarily the formal ones like Diderot and the others, who rather than hoarding, threw away), specialists (scientific and historical researchers), mathematicians, and even earnest collectors. What on odd coincidence that must seem to be. Driven by what? What motivates all these weirdos exploring and writing and producing new artifacts about obscure crap that nobody else cares about? And in public, on the Web, too.

Yup, definitely we’re overloaded with information.

Two kinds of people

Are there? Two kinds of people?

Here I’m thinking about people who enjoy traversing the web of implications vs. those who don’t. I think Laura and I and Barbara and Ackroyd and Fort and Shalizi and a number of other folks are in the first group.

Surely the people who complain about information overload are in the second. The people who are bothered when their TV Guide lists a hundred channels, who balk when they see music flowing between makers and customers unencumbered by the physical distribution system, who don’t respond to people who send them emails. The people who feel Intelligent Design will be taught in the schools of the future, who feel pornography could be controlled, who have revived the notion of Manifest Destiny.

After all, if they weren’t in the second group… well, they’d see the implications of the implications, wouldn’t they? They’d get that now we are all swimming in a library, inspired by the people they’d equate with the Lords of Chaos (Borges and Fort and Ackroyd and their ilk), not the Lords of Law (Taylor? Diderot?). They still imagine it’s possible to categorize and formalize human endeavor and knowledge. Perhaps they don’t go the next step and say that they want to control it, but they’re willing to say that it should be the same as it’s always been. Alas, as over-simplifiers who ignore all that messy implication in favor of the Big Simple ones, these are the people least suited to understanding how life and culture have actually been. Ever.

Amusingly enough, what “information overload” has taught me this morning is that the people in the second group — the Ashcrofts and RIAAs and Elseviers, Al Qaeda and the Vatican, many of your schoolteachers and politicians, reactionaries and fundamentalists — are constrained by their own decisions to moving only along the old fixed network of knowledge and belief and law and order. The other folks… well, they’re able to make their own paths through the backwaters of implication. Roundabout.

Something like this little meandering essay has turned out.

The only thing the chaos folk must remember is that they must attend not just to trivia, but to the serious work of the world as well. Implications exist on all scales. Those who focus too much on a few large-scale links lack any sense of the complexity of the real world; those who focus too much on the smallest scales miss trends and cultural shifts and public life, and as a result are more easily divided and controlled by their foes.

Hmmm. I wonder if this has anything to do with politics in this country.

Here’s to Pain.

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The race who knew too much

April 9, 2004 at 7:35 am · Filed under Uncategorized

Over at Apt. 11D, in an April 8 post Laura describes her strategies for coping with information overload, and quotes Paglia and others on “kids these days.” Her inspiration, in turn, comes from an interview with David Shenk, author of Data Smog (visit Amazon via her associate’s link, please). Shenk’s book is just one of the current crop of works in many media regarding Information Overload as a negative thing.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a little skeptical of the “information overload” trope of modern commentary. On a couple of fronts.

First, this sense of inundation seems always to be cast as an intrinsic change in us (whether it’s our individual psyches or the culture or what is unclear). In any case, as a biologist and amateur anthropology geek, I have to doubt (a) that we are witnessing unprecedented large-scale changes now, and in fact that (b) people or cultures can so fundamentally change at all. Note that I’m not saying that change doesn’t happen — just that I don’t think the direction of change is towards more knowledge. I’ll tell you where I think it’s headed in a bit.

I can’t bring myself to believe that our forefathers were stupider or had less capacity, or that they failed to use what capacity they had to know and learn and remember stuff. I suspect my great-grandmother knew a lot more than I do about the people who lived in her neighborhood (a Slovak mountain village or a Welsh mining town, depending on the great-grandmother involved), about the local geography and people and folklore and religion, and so forth. Far more than I know about my neighbors. Heck, after seven years of living here, I just learned the surname of my neighbor across the street for the first time yesterday.

Instead, I know a number of people outside my village and valley, and regularly correspond with folks scattered over five continents. Know a lot more about biology and molecular engineering and Java programming and such, and far less about buggies and milking a cow and which local gentry to watch out for in a dark alley.

I have an odd feeling that the same complaints of “not having enough time or energy to keep up” arose when this whole writing thing began, and when books stopped being chained to shelves in libraries, and when the reading-silently-to-yourself thing became popular, and when newspapers and telephony spread, and so forth. In other words, somebody has felt the right to complain that “there’s too much to know these days” more or less steadily throughout history.

The Paglia paragraph Laura invokes strikes me as very similar (stylistically and in terms of attitude) to a paragraph I read in an essay in the Unpopular Review of 1914 (perhaps Cosma, who now owns the book, can confirm this). Or perhaps it was in an 1896 Harpers or Scribners from the late 19th Century.

It’s so hard to keep track of what they’re writing in the magazines these days. Well, what they were writing back in those days.

My point is: the sense of disruption does not arise from a matter of increasing quantity. While Laura (and I) have chosen for personal reasons of preference not to pay attention to contemporary popular things like American Idol and Foucault (and much of Paglia, in my case), the culture as a whole has also led us to give short shrift to buggies and blacksmiths and how to eke out a living from a kitchen garden patch and midwifery &c &c

The interesting thing, to me, is that the main difference caused by technology — books, magazines and such in addition to blogs and email — is a realignment of geographical and temporal boundaries to personal knowledge. Laura writes that on one day when she did her comprehensive exams, she had her head full of the works of Marx. But he’s a dead fellow, who lived an insurmountable distance away. Later today I will have to put aside my head full of aimless social conjecture and restock with a load of machine learning techniques and the R programming language for statistics. Later on, I’ll probably have to work out how to cook a chunk of pork roast given the sparse selection of stuff in our pantry, and perhaps in the evening will spend a few more pleasant hours listening to Jim Dale reading Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, which will require my mind to focus on what it recalls about the dementors, the implications of Albus Dumbledore’s brother, and that froggy lady (we’re not very far into the book yet, but hearing it read skillfully aloud is the only way to go).

That’s a lot of stuff regarding people I never met, written by people I never will meet, in places I will never visit, concerning things — especially in the case of machine learning algorithms and dementors — that I will never actually experience in my physical sensorium. Well, OK, the pork is here, somewhere. But the herbs are from that big company in Baltimore, and the garlic is not garlic I grew myself, and I sure don’t know how to light my stove — it just does it.

All this shuffling around will cause me little or no pain, as it turns out. Indeed, for me it can be a heady experience.

The incorrect thought I’m trying to correct is this: The difficulty and inconvenience and pressure people perceive about “modern life” does not come from increasing demands on their mental capacity. They’re not “getting full.” Their discomfort comes from lack of preparedness.

Think about it. I know generally that I’m headed for a wild ride through the world. I’ve braced myself. While I argue that everybody living in every culture has more or less the same sized stockpile of information in their heads, in my head there is a body of knowledge that acts as a suitable buffer or filter or “padding” to the transitions I make. In the head of, say, my Mom — who was born in the Depression era and enjoys television and reads a book or two a day — there is no infrastructure for coping with “interactive media”, and so interaction with the worlds of modern gaming, email or the Web leaves her feeling stressed.

My Mom’s stress is not from pressure of needing to know more than she can, it’s from acquiring knowledge outside her mental schema. Not “culture” or “future shock” as such, but the subtler relative of that feeling we all experience every day. Laura feels it when she is exposed to American Idol (as do I and Barbara and Cosma and many of my friends and colleagues), but I cope with that stress by hiding the television in a back room, and not having a full cable subscription. My immigrant Slovak grandparents probably felt a good deal of it when they took the long boat ride, but they coped by living in communities of their friends and relatives when they arrived in Cleveland. My fundamentalist relatives probably feel a good deal of it when they hear what happens on Angel, but they cope by going out of their way to avoid such “worldly” things.

But while there are personal and cultural defenses against the discomfort we feel at out-of-schema experiences and knowledge, there are also personal and cultural drives which lead folks to seek out these jarring experiences — things like travel, heresy, amusement parks, libraries, folk art. And some others.

If we feel overwhelmed by all this “new information”, why is it that we keep creating it?

[Updated a couple of cross-links and transferred from archives, 4/22/07]

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