Read Online The Information by James Gleick - Free Book Online Page A

question they preserve a solemn silence.… You would imagine that they had intelligence, but if you want to know anything and put a question to one of them, the speaker always gives one unvarying answer. ♦
     
     
    Unfortunately the written word stands still. It is stable and immobile. Plato’s qualms were mostly set aside in the succeeding millennia, as the culture of literacy developed its many gifts: history and the law; the sciences and philosophy; the reflective explication of art and literature itself. None of that could have emerged from pure orality. Great poetry could and did, but it was expensive and rare. To make the epics of Homer, tolet them be heard, to sustain them across the years and the miles required a considerable share of the available cultural energy.
    Then the vanished world of primary orality was not much missed. Not until the twentieth century, amid a burgeoning of new media for communication, did the qualms and the nostalgia resurface. Marshall McLuhan, who became the most famous spokesman for the bygone oral culture, did so in the service of an argument for modernity. He hailed the new “electric age” not for its newness but for its return to the roots of human creativity. He saw it as a revival of the old orality. “We are in our century ‘winding the tape backward,’ ” ♦ he declared, finding his metaphorical tape in one of the newest information technologies. He constructed a series of polemical contrasts: the printed word vs. the spoken word; cold/hot; static/fluid; neutral/magical; impoverished/rich; regimented/creative; mechanical/organic; separatist/integrative. “The alphabet is a technology of visual fragmentation and specialism,” he wrote. It leads to “a desert of classified data.” One way of framing McLuhan’s critique of print would be to say that print offers only a narrow channel of communication. The channel is linear and even fragmented. By contrast, speech—in the primal case, face-to-face human intercourse, alive with gesture and touch—engages all the senses, not just hearing. If the ideal of communication is a meeting of souls, then writing is a sad shadow of the ideal.
    The same criticism was made of other constrained channels, created by later technologies—the telegraph, the telephone, radio, and e-mail. Jonathan Miller rephrases McLuhan’s argument in quasi-technical terms of information: “The larger the number of senses involved, the better the chance of transmitting a reliable copy of the sender’s mental state.” ♦ ♦ In the stream of words past the ear or eye, we sense not just the items one by one but their rhythms and tones, which is to say their music. We, thelistener or the reader, do not hear, or read, one word at a time; we get messages in groupings small and large. Human memory being what it is, larger patterns can be grasped in writing than in sound. The eye can glance back. McLuhan considered this damaging, or at least diminishing. “Acoustic space is organic and integral,” he said, “perceived through the simultaneous interplay of all the senses; whereas ‘rational’ or pictorial space is uniform, sequential and continuous and creates a closed world with none of the rich resonance of the tribal echoland.” ♦ For McLuhan, the tribal echoland is Eden.
    By their dependence on the spoken word for information, people were drawn together into a tribal mesh … the spoken word is more emotionally laden than the written.… Audile-tactile tribal man partook of the collective unconscious, lived in a magical integral world patterned by myth and ritual, its values divine. ♦
     
     
    Up to a point, maybe. Yet three centuries earlier, Thomas Hobbes, looking from a vantage where literacy was new, had taken a less rosy view. He could see the preliterate culture more clearly: “Men lived upon gross experience,” he wrote. “There was no method; that is to say, no sowing nor planting of knowledge by itself, apart from the weeds