Too Much Information

BOOKS & ARTS NATURE|Vol 448|26 July 2007 became more and more prominent”. He con- Few of us are able to achieve a mature bal- The book’s central chapters follow a more cluded: “We should not delude ourselves: in the ance between our many activities and diverse conventional selection of examples spanning final analysis, the problem can only be solved relationships. Yet, despite his hectic work the development of Western civilization: from through the abolition of nuclear weapons. So schedule, Joseph Rotblat was universally the origins of writing in Mesopotamia for keep- long as they continue to exist, the danger will regarded as an exceptionally kind and generous ing commerce and administration records, to be with us.” person. His wife and her mother died in the the accumulation of books and bibliographic Rotblat would certainly have agreed, and Holocaust but members of the family joined records (at Alexandria, for example), through Visionary for Peace has a useful appendix of him in England after the war. An essay by his the Dark Ages in which Irish scribes worked a set of his writings, which include his 2003 niece, Halina Sand, demonstrates his human- alone outside traditional hierarchies (like paper, ‘The Nuclear Issue: Pugwash and the ity so well: “His warmth and kindness to me today’s bloggers, Wright suggests), and into Bush Policies’. This contains a typically inci- continued throughout his life, descending the age of print in the Renaissance. sive condemnation of the recent lurch to yet through the generations to my two daughters The author discusses some high points of more reliance on nuclear weapons in the West- and their children. In his mid-nineties, and early modern information management. For ern world: “The use of nuclear weapons is seen in poor health, he was still able to charm his example, Giulio Camillo’s memory theatre by the great majority of people in the world small great-great-niece and twin great-great- (around 1550) promised access to all knowl- as immoral, due to their indiscriminate nature nephews, just as he had once enthralled their edge through a system of visual mnemonic and unprecedented power. Their possession mother and their grandmother.” Joseph Rotblat cues; in 1751, the Encyclopédie of Diderot and — and therefore likely use — is thus equally was indeed a man of peace. ■ d’Alembert established the modern norm for unacceptable, whether by ‘rogue’ or benevolent Malcolm Dando is professor of international the encyclopaedia as an alphabetized, multi- regimes.” Little wonder then that Pugwash sci- security at the Department of Peace Studies, author, multivolume and illustrated reference entists have argued against the replacement of University of Bradford, Bradford, West Yorkshire, work; and at about the same time, Carl Lin- Trident by the United Kingdom. BD7 1DP, UK. naeus devised a precise set of rules for classification in nature. Wright pays special attention to the methods for classifying books between the late seventeenth and early twentieth centuries, which culminated in the development Too much information of multi-tiered, expandable hierarchies of standardized headings, such as Melvil Dewey’s Glut: Mastering Information Through the debate, but offers a well-informed account of decimal classification in the late nineteenth Ages information management across a surprising century. He points out that libraries and by Alex Wright range of examples. librarians have long been at the forefront of Joseph Henry Press: 2007. 296 pp. £16.99, Information management systems, which information management techniques. $27.95 typically rely on a combination of self-organ- Finally, Wright considers twentieth-cen- izing networks and hierarchical relationships, tury attempts to form a universal collection of Ann Blair are central to biological phenomena — from retrievable information, many of which are now ‘Information overload’ is a phenomenon we the evolution of multicellular organisms to the forgotten, although their original ambitions are know well — a Google search on the term dynamics of social insects. Wright draws from partially realized in the World Wide Web. Paul retrieves close to 2 million hits. But is it really sociobiology the suggestion that evolution has Otlet, for example, was a Belgian bibliographer as new as we think? “We are not the first favoured the development of particular human who dreamed of guiding users not just to the generation — nor even the first species — to cognitive behaviours in managing information, right books, but to their contents. His Mun- wrestle with the problem of information over- such as the drive to classify and the emotional daneum (1910) eventually consisted of more load,” Alex Wright reminds us in his ambitious attachment to symbols. He turns for confirma- than 12 million facts kept on index cards to new book, Glut. He seeks a balanced and his- tion to anthropologist Donald Brown’s notion which users could submit queries for a fee. The torically informed assessment of the digital of human universals and notes the particular American engineer Vannevar Bush envisioned revolution’s impact. As a former librarian now importance of the ice age that began some a machine called the ‘memex’, which would working as an information architect, Wright 40,000 years ago in forcing humans to interact retrieve information to match a query from combines insights from his areas of expertise more closely, thus stimulating the develop- texts stored on microfilm. Although Bush’s with a wide range of historical and scientific ment of drawing and symbolic objects. Wright article ‘As we may think’ (Atlantic Monthly, literature aimed at non-specialist audiences. argues that this “ice age information explosion 1945) is considered seminal today, Wright He does not attempt a synthesis of specialist brought humanity to the brink of literacy”. notes how little current information science N. STRAUSS/AKG IMAGES N. STRAUSS/AKG Many information management techniques were first developed in libraries, where hierarchical classification methods have existed for centuries. 412 NATURE|Vol 448|26 July 2007 BOOKS & ARTS has heeded Bush’s call for biological as well as mathematical models in computer science or his concerns about the influence of corpora- tions on the growth of the field. Wright shows more generally how the Internet has developed beyond the control or the approval of its early contributors (such as Tim Berners-Lee or Ted Nelson, the conceptual father of hypertext). MOMATIUK-EASTCOTT/CORBIS The historical perspective of Glut is admirable: Wright neither assumes a linear progress nor makes unwarranted claims about the novelty or the indebtedness of current technologies to earlier ones. He doesn’t try to predict what the lasting impacts of the Web will be, but notes that the Internet facilitates the formation of small, self-organized communities that have Hot seat: archaea thrive in the potential to undermine large hierarchical extreme environments. structures. In this way, he suggests that human culture may no longer be moving unidirection- ally as was once thought, towards coalescence into larger entities, but rather multidirection- Introducing the extremophiles ally. Wright clearly values the growth of grass- roots self-organization on the Web, but also The Third Domain: The Untold Story of they cause disease, such as giardia. The third acknowledges that bottom-up networks can Archaea and the Future of Biotechnology domain, the subject of this book, is the archaea. benefit from some hierarchical structure. by Tim Friend Although they are single-celled and definitely One pay-off of attending to earlier ambi- Joseph Henry Press: 2007. 250 pp. $27.95 not eukaryotes, they are not bacteria either. To tions for information control is to highlight see this point clearly, know that there are no some of the weaknesses of our current system. Sean Nee archaea that cause disease. If anyone has a good Wright notes, for example, that our search Envy the achievement of Carl Woese, who idea why this is, please contact me at once. It is algorithms and the metadata they create are announced his discovery of the third domain not that they are only found in strange places not transparent but are the work of software of life on Earth a mere 30 years ago. Marvel at where we do not go — your mouth, for exam- engineers operating within a world of com- the fact that most people are unaware of this ple, is teeming with them. Also, a particular mercial secrecy; and our weblinks that carry three-domain understanding of biodiversity. antibiotic that works by disrupting the infor- information about intellectual associations are Admire the journalist Tim Friend who mation-processing machinery in bacteria has evanescent and can disappear without leaving resigned from the newspaper USA Today to no effect on eukaryotes or archaea. The current a trace. Using the analogy of print’s arrival in write this superb book introducing the public understanding is that we share the same infor- the mid-fifteenth century, Wright warns of to the third domain. Buy it and enjoy the per- mation-processing genes as archaea. the potential for new technologies to seriously sonalities, the adventures, the drama and the It had long been conventional wisdom that disrupt established structures. However, his science too, all presented in an admirable mix the phylogeny — the family tree — of bacteria interpretation that printing caused the Protes- that is a terrific read. could not be constructed. Until recently, phy- tant Reformation is overly reductionist. Until recently, our view of life on Earth logenies had been based on morphology: we Wright’s conclusion that “as Internet users had changed little over centuries. There were look quite like gorillas and chimps, less like continue to congregate in small groups, such animals, plants and a bunch of little things gibbons, even less like howler monkeys, not at behavior harkens back to our deepest rooted such as bacteria.

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