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 19^th 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 19^th-​​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.

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 19^th 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]