Customer Reviews

Glut: Mastering Information Through The Ages

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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!

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

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.

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!

Wright's beautifully written book, Glut is the right book for you. Among other things, this book is a deeper exploration of the rich history of traditional information revolutions and how networks and hierarchies have co-existed for millennia mutually shaping each other. As Wright notes, the contributions of librarians from Callimachus (Library of Alexandria) in the 3rd Century BC to Cutter and Dewey in the 19th Century to Paul Otlet (the Mundaneum) and Eugene Garfield (precursor of bibliometrics and page ranking), in the 20th century A.D. to the present information organisation systems including the web has been phenomenon. The stories are fascinating.

Central to Wright's discussion is the role of libraries and librarians who contributed greatly such as Paul Otlet, who as Wright persuasively argues, envisioned today's web in the 1930's, well before Vannavar Bush. Wright discusses in great detail how Otlet's contributions could be on par with that of Vannevar Bush and Ted Nelson, all forbearers to Tim Berners-Lee's web. Important in this regard is the part of the discussion in the book on how Otlet came to conclude that catalogues and indexes available at the time could only guide the reader "as far as the individual book" but not to the relationship of the contents in other books; then Otlet saw the possibility of creating semantic links between documents (the "réseau").

The book is an important read for information architects, librarians and anyone interested about the web. It main contention is that hierarchies (traditional information organisation systems such as taxonomies) vis-à-vis networks (traditional tribal folk-categorisation systems and today's folksonomies) are not in opposition. Instead, as Wright argues, they complement each other. I think it is an interesting balance between ontologies and web 2.0 approaches.

Starting with the simple algorithmic rules behind the cathedral like architectural masterpieces of termites and progressing to the Science Citation Index and Google, Wright constructs a broad sweep of the history of information and information management allowing the reader to draw his or her own conclusions as to how we will manage the information overload of the nascent knowledge revolution. As insightful as it is profound, this book is a must read for anyone looking to understand the history and future of information management.

This book provides a wonderful history of the processes, techniques, and cultural importance of information. The insights in the final chapters are particularly useful for our understanding of that the WWW could become.

The title "Glut", however, is misleading -- it suggests that the book is about information overload. That is a malady of our age about which other books have commented, but it is not what *this* book is about.

Alex Wright explains that in this volume, he approaches the story of the information age "by squarely looking backward" and along the way, he (and his reader) will "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 the computer, to name a few." It is an especially exciting journey during which he explores separate but related subjects such as these:

o Creation and subsequent development of language and information
o Corresponding increase of information sources and documentation (e.g. papyrus, codex, printing press)
o Corresponding increase of difficulty with managing information (i.e. accessing, processing, organizing, updating, and distributing it)
o Emergence of communities that accelerate communication, cooperation, and collaboration
o Process by which the human race has reached a "precipice" between "the near limitless capacity of computer networks and the real physical limits of human comprehension"

Wright challenges his reader to ask: Have the nature and extent of information (i.e. its scope, depth, and volume) exceeded our ability to process it, much less manage it? Here's a related question: If so, will the need for hierarchical control systems preclude man's "deepest rooted social instincts"? Wright asserts -- and I agree -- that those instincts are returning to the fore, "as people adapt new technologies to invoke the ancient emotional circuitry that carried us through the age before symbols. The future of memory may lie not in our heads but in our hearts." I prefer to think that what we have is not a glut of information but, rather, a glut of as-yet unrealized potentialities. By reading Alex Wright's book, we gain a much deeper understanding of where we have been and thus are better prepared for what has yet to be achieved.

First, I have not read this book. I probably will; in fact, it's on my wish list. But, in searching through the index of this book, I see no mention of Alan Turing whatsoever. More shocking, no mention of Claude Shannon whose pioneering work with "information" was transcendent and revolutionary. Shannon first coined the word "bit" to describe the most basic unit of information in his groundbreaking 1948 paper entitled "A Mathematical Theory of Communication". Without it, and his work, there would be none of the electronic devices we take for granted today. I was quite disappointed that a work purporting to be about "Mastering Information..." has nothing to say about Claude Shannon, arguably, the most important figure in "information".

For a truly brilliant treatise on information, James Gleick's recent "The Information" is a must read.