Archives for posts with tag: information

The will to ask

March 1, 2012 //
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Be willing to ask questions about what is taken for granted. Try to think things through for yourself. There is plenty of information. You have got to learn how to judge, evaluate, and compare it with other things. You have to take some things on trust or you can’t survive. But if there is something significant and important, don’t take it on trust. As soon as you read anything that is anonymous, you should immediately distrust it. If you read in the newspapers that Iran is defying the international community, ask, “Who is the international community?” India is opposed to sanctions. China is opposed to sanctions. Brazil is opposed to sanctions. The Non-Aligned Movement is vigorously opposed to sanctions and has been for years. Who is the international community? It is Washington and anyone who happens to agree with it. You can figure that out, but you have to do the work. It is the same on issue after issue.

NOAM CHOMSKY
see also: Noam Chomsky The Purpose of Education

Artist: ROBERT MONTGOMERY

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More or less

April 8, 2011 //
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“The Universe (which others call the Library) . . .”

April 7, 2011 //
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What a strange chaos is this wide atmosphere we breathe! . . . The air itself is one vast library, on whose pages are for ever written all that man has ever said or woman whispered. There, in their mutable but unerring characters, mixed with the earliest, as well as the latest sighs of mortality, stand for ever recorded, vows unredeemed, promises unfulfilled, perpetuating in the united movements of each particle, the testimony of man’s changeful will.*

Thus Jorge Luis Borges began his 1941 story “The Library of Babel,” about the mythical library that contains all books, in all languages, books of apology and prophecy, the gospel and the commentary upon the gospel, the minutely detailed history of the future, the interpolations of all books in all other books, the faithful catalogue of the library and the innumerable false catalogues. The library (which others call the universe) enshrines all information. Yet no knowledge can be discovered there, precisely because all knowledge is there, shelved side by side with all falsehood. In the mirrored galleries, on the countless shelves, can be found everything and nothing. There can be no more perfect case of information glut. [We have made many towers of Babel.]

JAMES GLEICK, from The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood. New York : Pantheon, 2011.

See also: The Information: How the Internet Gets Inside Us

Photo source: Branch

*Charles Babbage

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“Go out those doors to the left right beside the elevators.”

March 21, 2011 //
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“dictionary, a malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic.”*

from JAMES GLEICK’s The Information

*Ambrose Bierce

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One might ask:

August 29, 2010 //
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Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?



T. S. ELIOT, Choruses from The Rock (1934)

Information without a form, a body, a person—’the phenomenon of individual intelligence’—is just ‘bits.’

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Are you experienced?

August 20, 2010 //
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The antihuman approach to computation is one of the most baseless ideas in human history. A computer isn’t even there unless a person experiences it. There will be a warm mass of patterned silicon with electricity coursing through it, but the bits don’t mean anything without a cultured person to interpret them.*

Information is alienated experience.

A file on a hard disk does indeed contain information of the kind that objectively exists. The fact the the bits are discernible instead of being scrambled into mush—the way heat scrambles things—is what makes them bits.

But if the bits can potentially mean something to someone, they can only do so if they are experienced. When that happens, a commonality of culture is enacted between the storer and the retriever of the bits. Experience is the only process that can de-alienate information.

JARON LANIER, from You Are Not A Gadget, New York : Knopf, 2010 p 26-9.

Pictured above: GORD SMITH

*my ital

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Categorically, passionately, subversively yours

June 9, 2010 //
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“One of the reasons I decided to enter this profession was because I’m in love with information, and the library remains one of the few spaces in our lives where information is not a commodity. . . . There’s a subversive element to librarianship that I adore.”

Zines are most valuable, it seems to me, as documentary artifacts and narratives when written by people who are hard to categorize: strays, self-identified women, men, transgenders, agitators, street people, punks, anyone who didn’t fit neatly in a society that organizes itself in simple binary categories—male or female, Democrat or Republican, black or white, married or single, adult or child. The author of the unusual zine I read had been an unhappy girl, until she started calling herself he and began a course of male hormones. After growing a beard and deepening his voice, but stopping short of surgery, he embarked on a relationship with a transvestite male. The self-identified male with female parts lived with a male who preferred to dress as a female. What were they? A couple. What was he? Even he wasn’t sure, though he felt right. The zine was a record of his unique life, which he felt a responsibility to document.

Who knows how many people are invisible because their stories don’t fit our categories?

MARILYN JOHNSON, This Book is Overdue: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All

Image: Barnard Zines

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“You can only go so far without human help.”*

June 5, 2010 //
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Jeffrey discovers a woman harmed by information excess. All the symptoms are present: bleeding from the nose and ears, vomiting, deliriously disconnected speech, apparent disorientation, and the desire to touch everything. She has a rubber mat rolled up under her arm and is walking around one of the new soft park benches recently installed by the city, palpating it hungrily. A small crowd had collected around her, listening to her complicated monologue: Birds of Prey Cards, sunspot souffle, Antarctic unemployment. Jeffrey hesitates. I’ve never seen one so far gone, he thinks. But, judging her young enough to warrant hope, he gently takes the rubber mat from the woman, unrolls it upon the pavement, and helps her to assume the memory-elimination posture. After a minute, the bleeding stops. “I was on my way to dance class,” she says to him, still running her ravening fingers over his leather coat sleeves, “when suddenly I was dazzled. I couldn’t tell where one thing left off and the next began.”

TED MOONEY, from Easy Travel to Other Planets. New York : Farrar, Straus, Giroux ; Toronto : McGraw-Hill Ryerson, c1981.

Artist: BARBARA KRUGER, Untitled (It). Public installation on display now at the AGO. Photo: Kirby

*Marilyn Johnson

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Librarians-a-Ga-Ga

June 2, 2010 //
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[thanks Warren]

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How librarians can save the world

March 30, 2010 //
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In tough times, a librarian is a terrible thing to waste.

A library is a place to go for a reality check, a bracing dose of literature, or a “true reflection of our history,” whether it’s a brick-and-mortar building constructed a century ago or a fanciful arrangement of computer codes. The librarian is the organizer, the animating spirit behind it, and the navigator. Her job is to create order out of the confusion of the past, even as she enables us to blast into the future.

MARILYN JOHNSON from This Book Is Overdue: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All

A basic primer in librarianship. Engaging stories highlight the ever-changing demands, roles and tasks of “finders”/librarians and “keepers”/archivists—the outbreak of “information studies,” “virtual libraries” and the “looming nightmares of lost digital data.” Librarians will eat this one up, deservedly so. Who doesn’t like to read about themselves, especially cast as a superhero?

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What is a book?

March 4, 2010 //
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Knowledge doesn’t have a shape. There are just too many useful, powerful, and beautiful ways to make sense of our world.



. . . as we invent new principles of organization that make sense in a world of knowledge freed from physical constraints, information doesn’t just want to be free. It wants to be miscellaneous.

. . . now we—the customers, the employees, anyone—We can confront the miscellaneous directly in all its unfulfilled glory. We can do it ourselves and, more significantly, we can do it together, figuring out the arrangements that make sense for us now and the new arrangements that make sense a minute later. Not only can we find what we need faster, but traditional authorities cannot maintain themselves by insisting that we go through them. The miscellaneous order is not transforming only business. It is changing how we think the world itself is organized and—perhaps more important—who we think has the authority to tell us so.

DAVID WEINBERGER, Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder

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How to Swim

February 27, 2010 //
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In the nonstop tsunami of global information, librarians provide us with the floaties and teach us how to swim.



LINTON WEEKS

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