World Famous Comics: Glut: Mastering Information Through The Ages
Glut: Mastering Information Through The Ages
By: Alex Wright Publisher: Joseph Henry Press Average Rating: Binding: Hardcover Label: Joseph Henry Press Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 296 Publication Date: June 01, 2007
Book Description: "Alex Wright delivers a fascinating tour of the many ways that humans have collected, organized, and shared information to show how the information age started long before microchips or movable type."-Publishers Weekly
"This stimulating book offers much opportunity to reflect on the nature and long history of information management as a damper to the panic or the elation we may variously feel as we face ever greater scales of information overload."-Nature
"Glut is a penetrating and highly entertaining meditation on our information age and its historical roots. Alex Wright argues that now is the time to take a hard look at how we have communicated with one another since coming down from the trees, because the way we organize knowledge determines much about how we live."-Los Angeles Times Book Review
"Glut is a readable romp through the history of information processing. Wright argues that advances in information technology have always sparked conflict between written and oral traditions."-New Scientist
"Glut defies classification. From Incan woven threads to Wikipedia, Alex Wright shows us that humans have been attempting to fix categories upon the world throughout history, and that organizing information is a fundamental part of what makes us human. Many books tell you how to organizing things-this one tells you why we do it."-Paul Ford, Associate Editor, Harper's Magazine
"Information technology is part of what makes us human, and its story is our own. In this masterfully written book, Alex Wright traces the roots of the IT Revolution deep into human prehistory, showing how our lives are intimately bound up with the 'escalating fugue' of information technology."-Louis Rosenfeld, coauthor of Information Architecture for the World Wide Web
"We have no idea how to handle the upcoming explosion of information. I found Alex Wright's quick, clear history of past methods for managing oceans of information to be a handy clue to where we are going. He introduces you to an ecosystem of information organizations far more complex and interesting than the mere 'search' tool."-Kevin Kelly, author of Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World
"This is a must-read for anybody who wants to understand where we've been and where we're going. A lucid, exciting book full of flashes of surprise about how we've done it all before: prehistoric beads as networking aids, third-century random access systems, seventh-century Irish monastic bloggers, eleventh-century multimedia, sixteenth-century hypertext. I wish I'd written it!"-James Burke, author of American Connections: The Founding Fathers Networked
The "information explosion" may seem like an acutely modern phenomenon, but we are not the first generation-or even the first species-to wrestle with the problem of information overload. Long before the advent of computers, human beings were collecting, storing, and organizing information: from Ice Age taxonomies to Sumerian archives, Greek libraries to Dark Age monasteries. Spanning disciplines from evolutionary theory and cultural anthropology to the history of books, libraries, and computer science, Alex Wright weaves an intriguing narrative that connects such seemingly far-flung topics as insect colonies, Stone Age jewelry, medieval monasteries, Renaissance encyclopedias, early computer networks, and the Internet. Finally, he pulls these threads together to reach a surprising conclusion, suggesting that the future of the information age may lie deep in our past.
Good start doesn't carry through I looked forward to this book with much anticipation and for the first half I was not disappointed. The descriptions of different approaches for managing information through the ages were both interesting and useful as a comparison point for current topics. However, once the book got into the 20th century I found that the coverage was both simplistic and also patchy. The examples and `history of information management, storage and representation in the computer age in particular were very web/hypertext specific and ignored many areas of progress and solutions from the corporate arena. I also found that there was a paucity of useful suggestions for what may be appropriate to address the problem with the book representing a viewpoint that the web will fix itself and everything which seems naïve.
The history of information
Alex Wright is a journalist and an information architect who argues that networked information systems are derived from monasticism, mythology, print technologies and computers. All information systems are either nondemocratic and top-down (a hierarchy) or peer-to-peer and open (a network).
"An organization chart is a kind of hierarchy in which employees are grouped into departments. Other types of hierarchies include government bureaucracies, biological taxonomies, or a system of menus in a software application.... A network, by contrast, emerges from the bottom up; individuals function as autonomous nodes, negotiating their own relationships.... Democracy is a kind of network, so is a flock of birds, or the World Wide Web."
Wright argues that networks and hierarchies collide, spawn, and reinforce one another constantly. The Gutenberg printing press allowed for the wide dissemination of previously exclusive information. Today, publishing houses disseminate information hierarchically.
"Internet users continue to congregate in small groups that often take shape outside traditional institutional containers. While this tendency toward self-organization might seem like an effect of the Internet's democratic architecture, such behavior also harkens back to our deepest-rooted social instincts.... On the scale of evolutionary history, institutions remain a short-lived hypothesis. For tens of thousands of years, human beings have interacted as social animals, following unwritten norms strengthened by kinship, reinforced by the limbic responses that strengthen our personal relationships, and transmitted through the spoken word. Today, we are seeing those instincts returning to the fore, as people adapt new technologies to invoke the ancient, emotional circuitry that carried us through the age before the dawn of symbols."
Wright is a very clear writer, who covers a vast amount of ground in a very interesting manner. His "aim in writing this book is to resist the tug of mystical techno-futurism and approach the story of the information age by looking squarely backward. ... From the vantage point of the digital age, we can approach the history of the information age in a new light. To do so requires stepping outside of traditional disciplinary constructs, however, in search of a new storyline. ... I traverse a number of topics not usually brought together in one volume: evolutionary biology, cultural anthropology, mythology, monasticism, the history of printing, the scientific method, eighteenth-century taxonomies, Victorian librarianship, and the early history of computers, to name a few."
For a generalist reader like myself, this is an absolutely fascinating book. Of course, Alex Wright cannot be an expert in every single field he discusses. He provides a superb bibliography which, even better, he maintains on his personal website, so that a reader can check not only his sources, but updates as new information becomes available.
I wish other authors would maintain their bibliographies on line. This book is worth buying simply to reward Wright's initiative.
Robert C. Ross 2008
Fascinating Alex Wright is an information architect and a self-styled generalist. He uses biology, neurology, culture, mythology, history, library science, and information science to trace information from the Ice Age to What is wrong with today's Internet and he does this in 252 pgs. (+notes, appendicies, and index)!
The book never makes the reader feel pressured by it's condensed nature. Instead the pace allows for a tapestry of colorful characters and events. There is plenty of material for the average reader to have familiarity with and lots of interesting new facets of information to discover.
The appendicies: John Wilkin's Universal Catagories, Thomas Jefferson's 1783 Catalog of Books, The Dewey Decimal System, and S.R. Ranganathan's Colon Classification, give some idea of the range and depth of the topics covered. An error on pg. 188 lists Appendix E for the current Universal Decimal Classification. This appendix does not exist. This still did not deter me from rating the book 5 Stars. This was the most interesting book that I read in 2007!
Get Glut I have a lot of books in my `to read' pile, but Glut went straight to the top. I knew it was going to be well researched and insightful, but I was surprised at how much fun I had reading it. I'm a big fan of arcane knowledge and quotable tidbits, and this book was full of both. Thanks to Alex for unearthing this knowledge that I now dispense liberally.
Hard to think of a page-turner in the field of information management, but one exists, and Alex Wright wrote it.
I'm not a big one for building a personal library. i usually read a book, then gift to a friend with the condition that they then pass it on. In this case, you may borrow my copy of Glut, but it needs to be returned to me. It's earned a spot on my bookshelf!
excellent look at information I am a graphic designer working on a thesis in information graphics. This book is easily the best book I have read in the course of my research. The style is quick and engaging. The information moves from a biologic look at how evolution may have driven the way we separate and categorize information - To historic looks at how information has been used. It is not specifically targeted at designers like Tufte's work, but I would recommend it for anyone interested in an overview of how information is used.
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