But he is confident that we can navigate it, challenging the view of techno-philosopher Jean-Pierre Dupuy that "ours is a world about which we pretend to have more and more information but which seems to us increasingly devoid of meaning". In the face of the information flood that David Foster Wallace called "total noise", he says, "we veer from elation to dismay and back". Nothing is forgotten the world imprints itself on the informatosphere at a scale approaching 1:1, each moment of reality creating an indelible replica.īut do we gain from it, or was TS Eliot right to say that "all our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance"? Gleick is refreshingly upbeat. All the twittering and tweeting today, the blogs and wikis and apparent determination to archive even the most ephemeral and trivial thought has, as James Gleick observes in this magisterial survey, something of the Borgesian about it. Robert Burton, the Oxford anatomist of melancholy, confessed in 1621 that he was drowning in books, pamphlets, news and opinions. Alexander Pope quipped that the printing press, "a scourge for the sins of the learned", would lead to "a deluge of Authors covered the land". T oo much information: the complaint du jour, but also toujours.
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