Tag Archives: james gleick

Blast Through Your Past – with Google Street View

“in Sensation we believe external Things exist, in Memory we believe they were, in Imagination we neither do the one nor the other” (Erasmus Darwin quoting poet Richard Gifford back to himself in a letter of 1768.)

Here’s something to try if you haven’t already done it: make a Google Street View tour of all the old homes you’ve ever lived in.

Of course, if you’ve yet to leave the parental home it’s going to be a dull exercise, but if you’ve been around a while and lived in lots of different places, there’s the joy of reminiscing and spotting that the new owners have gotten around to replacing that leaky porch you ignored all those rainy winters.

Street View hasn't caught up with the Belgians - or vica versa

It took me half an hour to track down the twelve places I’ve lived in, bought, or rented over the years (some in the pic above); although the flat I lived in for four years in Brussels came out as, well, flat.  Belgium seems to have been overlooked by Google Street View)

Apart from the idle interest, dredging the past evokes ideas around the concept of time and how we store information and remember things; although if that’s just me, it’s because I’m presently transitioning between two books that touch on the topic: The Information by James Gleick and Jon Turney’s Winton Prize-longlisted The Rough Guide to the Future.

We capture so much nowadays – Gleick: “The information produced and consumed by humankind used to vanish  – that was the norm, the default.  The sight, the sounds, the songs, the spoken word just melted away.”

Then came the first marks on paper, drawings, writing; then photographs. Gleick again:

Now expectations have inverted.  Everything may be recorded and preserved, at least potentially: every musical performance; every crime in a shop, elevator, or street; every volcano or tsunami on the remotest shore; every card played or piece moved in an online game; every rugby scrum and cricket match.

Whether it’s Street View, Flickr, or Friends Reunited, there’s a bunch of stuff pushing in on us, persuading us to reconstruct our pasts in a way that was alien even five years ago.

What does it mean?  Is it good?

For sure, any ideas we might have had about ‘clean breaks’ and ‘moving on’ get a good muddying.  Old friends: material and personal, reappear unbidden – sometimes welcome, othertimes unsettling away from their original context.

In his chapter About Time, Turney says our memories impact our ability to think about the future; afterall, past experience is pretty much all we have to draw on.

The way we build memories, he says, may have adapted specifically to enable the efficient anticipation of new situations, and there is even evidence of a physical link in how we think about past and future events – neurological scans revealing common areas of brain activity.

Our memories “seem to work by storing individual pieces of past experience separately, as part of a complicated, interconnected web …. Our brains then assemble recollections of past episodes by adding together bits of information that seem to be related.

As it happens, by Turney’s reckoning, I’m probably at the optimum age for projecting  possible futures.  Meaning, I’m old enough to have collected some experiences, but not so old I’ve forgotten them all.  (I love some of the terminology people use for age brackets, particularly the ‘old old’ – meaning over 80.  At 49, I’m holding out for ‘young middle-age’.)

I want to wind up the post by sharing some great life-changing revelations resulting from this technology-induced disturbance in my mental time-space continuum and reassessment of ‘self’. But as the most emotionally charged evocations seem to relate to the unfeasible number of lawnmowers I’ve owned over the years, I’ll skip on that and instead leave you with a bit of topical DNA:

“Time is an illusion.  Lunchtime doubly so.”

Douglas Adams.  Hitch-hikers Guide to the Galaxy

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Information – James Gleick in Conversation at the RSA

James Gleik and Nico MacDonald (Photo: Tim Jones)
James Gleick (left) and Nico MacDonald (right) discuss Information at the RSA (Photo:Tim Jones)

I haven’t yet read James Gleick’s latest book Information, but was glad of the chance to hear him in conversation with Nico MacDonald at London’s RSA yesterday for a flavour of what’s in store.  This is a brief write-up of my notes and some observations – it’s not a book review! (That may come later…)

The broad discussion covered topics ranging from the history of Information Theory, how new communications systems and technologies come about and how they’re applied, the rapid pace of developments, and related issues around information quality, choice, control, value, and authority.

James Gleik (Photo:Tim Jones)
James Gleick (Photo:Tim Jones)

Information Theory

Gleick introduced the father of Information Theory, Claude Shannon, who, building on foundations set down by George Boole and Alan Turing, developed the first mathematical theory of communication and the idea that  information is measureable  – in  ‘bits’.

His approach of separating information from meaning in a structured scientific way was another first, launching a way of thinking that has since fed into all areas of formal communications and training.

Shannon’s ideas evolved out of work addressing real-world communications engineering problems at his employer Bell Laboratories,  while other developments in information theory were driven by military objectives like those related to the codebreakers at Bletchley Park and the  communication needs of the Cold War.

James Gleick (Photo: Sven Klinge)
James Gleick (Photo: Thanks Sven Klinge)

Development and Impact of the new

Gleick believes new technologies and systems appear first, followed by a series of highly unpredictable applications. Who, for example, would have thought the recently invented radio would play a critical role in capturing the murderer Dr. CrippenSee Note 1.  Escaping to America by boat, Crippen was intercepted and arrested in Canadian waters after a wireless telegram exchange with the British Police.

But do new ideas and technologies just appear?   Gleick argues that intellectual invention happens when the time is right.  I’m not 100 percent clear on this, but he may have been referring to times of inspired national growth, and/or where intellectual groundwork has been done in related or previously unrelated fields, as was the case with Shannon embracing Boole’s and Turin’s legacy.   And once these systems arrive, says Gleick, it’s not unusual to see “all hell breaking loose”.

Consider the geographical reach and speed at which information jets around the world today.  I trust he’ll forgive me for this in the interest of illustration, but when Nico MacDonald mis-pronounced Gleick’s name during introductions today (Gleick pronounces his name ‘Glick’), that little faux pas was broadcast live, archived for webcast, and picked up by at least one troublesome blogger :-).   That’s what this web-enabled, multi-media, Googlised, Twitterific world will do for you.  On the other hand, those same information systems do little to inform us how we should pronounce ‘Gleick’; it’s not like every textual instance is accompanied by a phonetic brief.  (I got it wrong too, so I guess we’re all better people for the experience.)

It’s also apparent that the forms of knowledge we are comfortable with are changing.  Gleick recounted the story of Zick Rubin, whose recent piece in the New York Times titled “how the internet tried to kill me” describes how Rubin found his own death reported on a wiki – something of a shock to say the least.  As it turned out, the wiki itself wasn’t the culprit, but a printed directory from which false information had been drawn.  Had Rubin not run his search, the directory’s failings would never have come to light, and at least the wiki can, and has, been corrected at the press of a button.

Choice and control

Whether it’s the phone, radio, or world wide web, Gleick believes we’ve always driven our communications systems for more efficiency.  But now the new systems and tools are coming ever thicker and faster – tempting us, thrusting themselves upon us – with Ads!

This overload is forcing us to make choices: Do I sign up to this?  Who do I follow / unfollow?  What’s my decision criteria?  As an audience member summed up:  “Our attention matters and we should think more how best to mobilise it”.

Once again, a discussion at the start of the session is topical: this time on the merits and de-merits of in-session Tweeting.  As you might expect in the spirit of an Information flavoured event, the RSA had laid on WiFi and a hashtag so attendees could Tweet from the meeting.  But I don’t think Gleick, while playing along gamefully, was really up for it – suggesting it might distract us from the discussion.   And while I fully support in-event Tweeting, he is of course dead right; it’s a self-inflicted distraction that needs self-management. I’ve come across similar mini-controversies concerning chit-chat and questions during presentations in virtual worlds.

Value, quality, filtration

Into the Q&A, and a discussion on the potential for information to add value and generate competitive advantage.  The conclusion here is that Gleick sees value linked to overcoming new economic challenges, so: publishers exploring new business models for e-books, and newspapers “scared to death about Twitter” looking for ways to compete with free news.

And as to us being overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information – reliable and unreliable – that all these new systems are generating?  Gleick thinks not, but only if we sort out faster methods of recovering quality information and making intelligent recommendations.  Efficient suppliers of those sorts of services will find themselves in a growth business.

Authority

If the information is good and there’s one set of agreed facts, then conclusions will speak for themselves – right? Wrong, says Gleick, pointing to those who would resist the overwhelming evidence for climate change; and that small group of Americans who still dispute Obama was born on Hawaii.

Moreover, he worries we might lose science as an “authoritative, trustworthy, account” in a world –  as MacDonald observed – where some people decide a position upfront, only then looking to science to back it up – the antithesis of the scientific attitude of finding out facts and seeing where they lead.

Age of the information zombies

James Gleik and Tim Jones (Photo:Sven Klinge)O.k., no one even mentioned information zombies.  But the audience did wonder if access to ‘too much, too easy’ information might stop us (and particularly students) from concentrating and analysing properly. I got the impression Gleick was sanguine on this, but with a note of caution given we don’t even know the full effect that replacing mental arithematic with calculators has had, never mind the impact of the full on info-fest that is Google.

So, that was pretty much it – a thoroughly enjoyable lunchtime.

And as you see, I’ve got my signed copy of Information.  Hopefully some ‘bits’ will agree with what I’ve just written :-P.

 

Note 1 – Updated 14/4/11. There was a mix up over stories in the conversation, with Crippen being confused with the murderer John Tawell. In 1845, Tawell was captured at Paddington Station thanks to the new telegraph (wired) being used to signal ahead that he was on the train from Slough where he had committed the murder. I’ve filled in the correct later story for Crippen, which is an analagous example but for the wireless rather than wired telegraph.

Event Audio – The audio of the event is here at the RSA’s Website

Royal Society Vidcast – Gleick presented at the Royal Society on the following day.  Here is the vidcast at the RS’s website.

Also of interest: James Gleick interviewed on CastRoller