Following on from Tim Wu's excellent talk about Information Empires recently at the RSA I had high hopes for this talk. While the talk and questions immediately after did not disappoint you were left hungry for his book The Information'. Of course in an ideal world we would be treated to a double bill with James Gleick and Timothy Wu taking to the stage. Not quite Godzilla Versus the Sea Monster but instead two Information superheroes, though I am not exactly sure what they will save us from? information overload perhaps.
Having read Wu and listened to Gleick my view is that their is some overlap; both take a historical view. Both examine the importance of the telephone and telegraph. Both takes a historical road that arrives at the internet and in doing so remind us that the internet is just one more (albeit special) part of the story of how we communicate and disseminate information. In some respects their message is that of the historian; we must examine the past to have a better understanding of the present day internet. However Gleick's focus was on 'Information' and its relationship with knowledge. What is it we really want? knowledge not simply the Information. This is why the New York Times will survive because they have the skills to turn information into knowledge for their readers. Gleick reminded us that forms of knowledge are changing were once the book was central to transporting knowledge around the world. You can see that more clearly in Melvyn Bragg's recent TV series about the King James Bible. But in today's world more and more knowledge is kept in the cloud. To access it we need not turn a page but instead turn too a search engine like Google. We search, we get information but Gleich points out this information is very impersonal. What could be more personal? well Twitter and Gleich spent some of the talk advocating Twitter not quite over Google but as being more personal. For example using Twitter we choose what information sources to follow. We follow The Guardian on Twitter which in turn delivers information to us and should we tire of that we simply un-follow thereby turning of the information tap. Gleich thinks that Google needs to and will eventually make search more personal, my view is that they will.
Like Twitter it starts with a 'T' but the next one is the Telegraph. Gleich who spent seven years on his book, admitted that he began with the idea that telephone was more important. However his research led him to conclude the telegraph was more important. We apply the word 'revolution' glibly to so many aspects of todays internet but in its day the telegraph Gleich reminds us; compressed time and space and played a part in the creation of world markets. More importantly in terms of the information it provided about our world people became more interested in for example what the weather was like in London. The advent of the telegraph heralded the arrival of weather as an item in our newspapers though in the UK the weather is close to a national obsession. Incidentally it was the Admiralty in the UK that created the first weather office and weather updates were sent by telegraph.
Alongside Tim Wu, James Gleich illuminates our understanding of what some people refer to as the "oil that will drive the 21st century'. Information as the new oil might sound dramatic but this is a commodity that drives some of the biggest companies of our age. Eric Schmidt puts it like this "When I grew up it was basically about enterprises – IT. Today computer science is really about consumers and information"
In the 19th and 20th century states have fought wars to gain control over commodities such as oil and steel. In the latter half of the 21st century if information is as important as some commentators claim then would we see conflict between states over who controls the information that ebbs and flows over the internet?
