Inscription Earth/Arbre

Yup, Anathem‘s kicked in. It’s still an overblown space opera but with Ortho’s encouragement, Albert Borgmann’s brilliant Holding On To Reality: The Nature of Information at the Turn of the Millennium has reared its seductive and wonderful head again. There are few books I’ve read that really deal with information properly and much as Neal Stephenson has tried, he isn’t equipped to do it. Sorry Neal, but neither am I.

Borgmann is, but even he chooses to quote from a far greater man than is alive today, Victor Hugo. Consider this from Notre-Dame de Paris:

When the memory of the first races felt itself overloaded, when the mass of reminiscences of the human race became so heavy and so confused that speech naked and flying, ran the risk of losing them on the way, men transcribed them on the soil in a manner which was at once the most visible, most durable, and most natural. They sealed each tradition beneath a monument.

So we have Abraham building “an altar unto the Lord”, etc. Monuments are ‘hard signs’, according to Borgmann – they cannot convey information from place to place. They are one bit of information, limited in space and, often, time.

As an ex-archaeologist, this is fascinating. We assume that monuments are a reduction, a symbolic offering of a system of thought, an architectural remembrance of synaptic firings over time. And so they are. But in the mind of the receptor, the interpretor, they are a bit, Borgmann maintains.

I nearly buy this. Years ago (back in 2001!) when Jeff Noon published a novel called Needle in the Groove (his powers were waning at this point frankly) I was looking at a future where we would all be frequency freaks. It didn’t matter what the rhythm was, or the melody, it was the electromagnetic frequency that mattered. I was sorely wrong – now we are broadband consumers of the broad band. I misread.

The last couple of days there’s been a fair amount of discussion on wide-spectrum British media about the death of blogging (again). The gist is that blogs give way to Twitter (Mark, I believe we’ve had this conversation before). My response is that, OK, attention-span, frequency-jacking (as I may once have believed), will reduce the ability of people to be able to concentrate on all but a steadily-reducing number of characters in order to obtain some form of usable information. My contention is that we if reduce from the blog, to the twitter-haiku, to the bit, once again all our simplest utterances are equivalent to physical monuments of earth and stone.

And then we build. From the bit to the blog? Well, I don’t know about that, but from the bit anyway. This information-utility cycle is resurgent and consistent.

That leaves us with two possibilities:

1. We are creating more information (and the amount of information is going up)

2. We are relating to more information (and the amount of information stays the same)

Now that Stephen Hawking has announced that he no longer believes that black holes destroy information, contrary to his 1970s theories, we are in a different universe. You still don’t want to get within several light years of the fuckers but his point is critical – if the universe is informational, there is no balance to restore, and our puny attempts to create information are irrelevant in cosmic terms. Occam’s Razor suggests that if that is the case, then we are effectively option #2: relating more to information, not creating it.

So, are we important? Are we an information strange attractor in the arms of the Milky Way? Hell, no. There are glitches and nodes, potboilers and rabbit-holes of information. All this information we allegedly produce is merely a knot of informational activity in the galactic sense. What implications does this have for blogging? None. Whatsoever. Do whatever thou wilt.

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