杏吧原创

From a half-forgotten Einstein quote to the complete works of J.聽S. Bach, everything is instantly available. But what can we really do with it all?

A HALF-CENTURY ago Marshall McLuhan wrote: 鈥淲e are today as far into the electric age as the Elizabethans had advanced into the typographical and mechanical age. And we are experiencing the same confusions and indecisions which they had felt when living simultaneously in two contrasted forms of society and experience.鈥� His electric age had no email, no web-surfing, no cellphones, much less Facebook and Twitter. McLuhan was mainly watching television.

We don鈥檛 call it the electric age any more. We know perfectly well that we are living in the information age. But McLuhan was right: we are still experiencing 鈥渃onfusions and indecisions鈥�, more than ever before. There is a universally recognised metaphor for our predicament: flood. There is a sensation of drowning, of information as a rising, churning deluge. Data washes over us from above and below. One may lose the ability to impose order on the chaos of sensations. Truth seems hard to find amid a multitude of plausible fictions.

Our world is built on the science of information theory, created by engineers and mathematicians in the 1940s, but hard on the heels of information theory have come 鈥渋nformation overload鈥�, 鈥渋nformation glut鈥�, 鈥渋nformation anxiety鈥�, and 鈥渋nformation fatigue鈥�. This last was recognised by the Oxford English Dictionary in 2009 as a syndrome for our times: 鈥渁pathy, indifference, or mental exhaustion arising from exposure to too much information, especially (in later use) stress induced by the attempt to assimilate excessive amounts of information from the media, the internet, or at work鈥�.

In 2007, the writer David Foster Wallace coined a more ominous name for this modern condition: 鈥渢otal noise鈥�, created by 鈥渢he tsunami of available fact, context, and perspective鈥�. He talked about the sensation of drowning and also of a loss of autonomy, of personal responsibility for being informed.

Another way to speak of the anxiety is in terms of the gap between information and knowledge. A barrage of data so often fails to tell us what we need to know. Knowledge, in turn, does not guarantee enlightenment or wisdom. As T. S. Eliot asked in his pageant play The Rock: 鈥淲here is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?鈥� It is an ancient observation, but it seems to bear restating as information becomes ubiquitous 鈥� and we live in a world where all bits are created equal and information is divorced from meaning.

What do you do when you have everything at last? The philosopher Daniel Dennett imagined in 1990, just before the internet made this possible, that electronic networks could upend the economics of publishing poetry. Instead of slim books, elegant speciality items marketed to connoisseurs, what if poets could publish online, instantly reaching not hundreds but millions of readers, not for tens of dollars but fractions of pennies?

That same year, the publisher Charles Chadwyck-Healey conceived of The English Poetry Full-Text Database as he walked through the British Library one day. Four years later, he had produced it, and it represented not the present or future of poetry, but the past, and not, at first, online but in four compact discs: 165,000 poems by 1250 poets spanning 13 centuries, priced at $51,000.

Readers and critics had to work out what to make of this. Not read it, surely, the way they would read a book. Delve into it, perhaps. Search it, for a word, an epigraph, a half-remember fragment. His CD-ROMs are already obsolete. All English poetry is on the network now 鈥� or if not all, some approximation thereof, and if not now, then soon.

The past folds accordion-like into the present. Different media have different event horizons: for the written word, three millennia, for recorded sound, a century and a half 鈥� and within their time frames the old become as accessible as the new. Yellowed newspapers come back to life. Under headings of 鈥�50 Years Ago鈥� and 鈥�100 Years Ago鈥�, veteran publications recycle their archives: recipes, card-playing techniques, science, gossip, once out of print and now ready for use. Record companies rummage through their attics to release, or re-release, every scrap of music, rarities, B-sides and bootlegs. For a certain time, collectors, scholars or fans possessed their books and their records. There was a line between what they had and what they did not. For some, the music they owned (or the books, or the videos) became part of who they were.

That line fades away. Most of Sophocles鈥檚 plays are lost, but those that survive are available at the touch of a button. Most of Bach鈥檚 music was unknown to Beethoven; we have it all 鈥� partitas, cantatas and ringtones. It comes to us instantly, or at light speed. It is a variety of omniscience. It is what the New Yorker music critic Alex Ross calls the Infinite Playlist, and he sees that as a mixed blessing: 鈥渁nxiety in place of fulfilment, an addictive cycle of craving and malaise. No sooner has one experience begun than the thought of what else is out there intrudes.鈥� Another reminder that information is not knowledge, and knowledge is not wisdom.

Strategies emerge for coping. There are many, but they boil down to two: filter and search. The harassed consumer of information turns to filters to separate the metal from the dross. Filters include blogs and aggregators 鈥� the choice raises issues of trust and taste. The need for filters intrudes on any thought experiment about the wonders of abundant information. When Dennett imagined his Complete Poetry Network, he saw that filters would be needed in the shape of editors and critics. When information is cheap, attention becomes expensive.

A 鈥渇ile鈥� was originally a wire on which slips of paper, bills, notes and letters could be strung for preservation and reference. Then came file folders, file drawers, file cabinets, and then their electronic namesakes. The irony, in all these cases, was the same: once a piece of information is filed, it is statistically unlikely ever to be seen again by human eyes. The British mathematician and logician Augustus de Morgan knew this even in 1847. For any random book, he said, a library was no better than a waste-paper warehouse. 鈥淭ake the library of the British Museum鈥� valuable and useful and accessible as it is: what chance has a work of being known to be there, merely because it is there? If it be wanted, it can be asked for; but to be wanted it must be known. Nobody can rummage the library 鈥︹��

鈥淥nce a piece of information is filed, it is statistically unlikely to be seen again鈥�

When new information technologies alter the landscape, they bring disruption: new channels and new dams rerouting the flow of irrigation and transport. The balance between creators and consumers is upset: writers and readers, speakers and listeners. Market forces are confused; information can seem too cheap and too expensive at the same time. The old ways of organising knowledge no longer work. Who will search, who will filter?

We will learn new ways. No deus ex machina waits in the wings; no man behind the curtain. We have no Maxwell鈥檚 demon to help with our sorting. 鈥淲e want the Demon, you see,鈥� wrote Stanislaw Lem in The Cyberiad, 鈥渢o extract from the dance of atoms only information that is genuine, like mathematical theorems, fashion magazines, blueprints, historical chronicles, or a recipe for ion crumpets, or how to clean and iron a suit of asbestos, and poetry too, and scientific advice, and almanacs, and calendars, and secret documents, and everything that ever appeared in any newspaper in the Universe, and telephone books of the future 鈥︹��

Because omniscience is a curse. The answer to any question may arrive at the fingertips 鈥� via Google or Wikipedia or IMDb or YouTube or Epicurious or the National DNA Database or any of their natural heirs and successors 鈥� and still we wonder what we know. Choosing the genuine information requires work. Then forgetting takes even more work.