Experimental Blog #145

Quotations from "The Information" - A History, A Theory, A Flood by James Gleick

"The hardest technology to erase from our minds is the first of all: writing. ..'Without writing{Walter Ong}, words as such have no visual presence, ..'"
"The written word is the mechanism by which we know what we know. It organizes our thought. ... Language is not a technology, .. it is what the mind does."
"Before writing, communication is evanescent and local; sounds carry a few yards and fade to oblivion."

"In all the languages of earth there is only one word for alphabet. The alphabet was invented only once. .. near the eastern littoral of the Mediterranean Sea, ... not much before 1500 BCE .. "

"Logic might be imagined to exist independent of writing - ... but it did not. .. Logic descended from the written word, in Greece as well as India and China, where it developed independently."
"Mathematics too, followed from the invention of writing .."

"Three great waves of electrical communication crested in sequence: telegraphy, telephony, and radio. .. These devices changed the topology - ripped the social fabric and reconnected it .."

"Information{according to the American engineer Claude Shannon in 1948 or '49} is uncertainty, surprise, difficulty, and entropy .."

"Memes{bodiless replicators} emerge in brains and travel outward, establishing beachheads on paper and celluloid and silicon and anywhere else information can go."
"Memes could travel wordlessly even before language was born. Plain mimicry is enough to replicate knowledge .."

"The information produced and consumed by mankind used to vanish .. Now expectations have inverted. Everything may be recorded and preserved, at least potentially: every musical performance; every crime in a shop, elevator, or city 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."