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.