The age of information: how we got the message

It's a comforting human instinct to believe that where we are now is a direct, probably inevitable, consequence of where we were then. James Gleick's new book The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood, suggests that, for our networked, global, always-on world, the truth is otherwise.

'Flood' is right. We find ourselves drowning in information and, what's worse, it's networked information. The old information, the sort you got from the Encyclopaedia Britannica, was like being closeted with a bore. The new information is like being chained to a madman. Look up 'thyristor' and two hours later you're comparing the prices of different brands of snake-handling accessories, even though you don't have a snake.

It wasn't so long ago that we were being told that we lived in an Information Economy. No need to bash metal or dig stuff out of the ground. We could just process information and money would happen, as if by magic.

But most of us had no snake. The few who did have a snake are now happily sucking on their bonuses. For the rest of us, the information, squirting between computers at warp speed, untouched by human mind, was meaningless. When it was exposed for what it was - a big Nothing - we were all taken by surprise.

The same Information that allowed and provoked the financial meltdown has also replaced the old rule of law with the new law of rules. The speed camera clocks you, the password misremembered, the Oystercard depleted? Tough. There's no leeway, no human agent, no compromise. Computer says no.

But, as Gleick's book makes clear, none of this was inevitable.
 
The Law of Unintended Consequences casts its long shadow from the very birth of information theory. When Charles Babbage, who (with his muse and taskmistress Ada Lovelace) built the first great working computer entirely in his head, was asked by the King of Sardinia in 1840 what the new-fangled electric telegraph was good for, he couldn't think of anything at first. Eventually he came up with the idea of finding out the weather elsewhere in real time.

Babbage's guess became reality. Meteorology couldn't get going until simultaneous observations were possible, and later itself drove the search for ever more powerful computers.

Telephones, like almost everything else, were misunderstood at first. A Midwestern mayor said that he could see a time when every town in America would have one (just as, a century later, the president of IBM said there was a global market for perhaps five computers in all). Originally phones were touted as devices for "listening-in" to concerts and sermons; it was users who decided to employ them for talking.

The telephone number itself - the first human device to demand 100 per cent precision; there's no such thing as an almost-right phone number - was the result of a measles epidemic in Lowell, Massachusetts in 1879, when Dr Moses Greeley Parker worried what would happen if the four operators, who ran the switchboard by shouting across the room at each other, succumbed. Give each subscriber a number, he reasoned, and make an alphabetical list.

Even our skyscraping cityscapes have been moulded as much by IT as by the invention of the elevator. If all messages had to be hand-delivered by messenger boys, Gleick explains, they'd need so many lifts there'd be no room for offices.

Meanwhile the information scientists grind away in their little rooms, inventing codes (the American exchanges had code-books: "babble, baby, baal" they'd wire to each other, and look it up. "Button"? Ah: "Market quiet and prices easier."), compressing language, counting links, tuning their algorithms.

Whether this proves to be a viable basis for an economy or not - it's certainly viable for Google, but for Britain? - we all now live by information.

We may have arrived here by accident but how it happened is a hell of a tale, ranging from carved stones to the incompleteness of mathematical systems, from the talking drums of Africa (they didn't encode speech; they actually spoke) to the Cretan paradox "this statement is false"; from noisy phone lines to Maxwell's Demon.

As we choke in our info-smog, as the world becomes increasingly ruled by opaque data-farms and their silent unapproachable priesthood, we might also consider one of the information technologists' founding principles, laid down by Bell Telephone's Claude Shannon, the most significant figure in the modern world who nobody's heard of. "The 'meaning' of a message is generally irrelevant," he wrote.
 
Comforting? Well, yes, in a way. He meant "irrelevant" within the system. To get "meaning", you need humans. Perhaps there's hope for us yet.

•: The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick, Fourth Estate. ISBN 978-0-00-722573-6. ·