Networked

REMEMBER the Borg? The ultimate villains -- or villain -- of “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” they were a species that networked so prodigiously that they became as one and went on to assimilate every individual they encountered.

Is this where human society is headed? And how bad is that? These are questions that may cross your mind while reading Alex Wright’s “Glut,” a penetrating and highly entertaining meditation on our information age and its historical roots. Wright argues that now is the time to take a hard look at how we have communicated with one another since coming down from the trees, because “we stand at a precipice: between the near-limitless capacity of computer networks and the real physical limits of human comprehension” -- and the way we organize knowledge determines much about how we live.

The digital age has begun to dissolve information hierarchies in favor of a democratic system of networks, embodied most obviously in the Internet. But what will such a leveling produce? Early in the book, Wright notes the prediction of Catholic mystic Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who, contemplating the advent of radio and television, “believed that this burgeoning networked consciousness signaled a new stage in God’s evolutionary plan, in which human beings would coalesce into a new kind of social organism, complete with a nervous system and brain that would eventually spring to life of its own accord.”

Well, that hasn’t happened yet (despite the near-assimilation of millions of formerly autonomous HBO subscribers into the Soprano family), but might it? Wright attempts an answer by way of a careful examination of past information revolutions and their effects. Way past: He locates the origins of our species’ ability to organize information (which he concisely defines as “the juxtaposition of data to create meaning”) in the transition 2 billion years ago from unicellular life to eukaryotes, multicellular entities that incorporated “their formerly independent siblings into a kind of cellular serfdom.”

After a nod to subsequent “self-directed biological hierarchies” (bird flocks, fish schools, ant colonies, beehives), Wright gets to Homo sapiens, claiming that the “similarities in human behavior among otherwise disparate cultures” suggests that we have inherited our tendency to systematize the world around us.

He embarks on a history of this systematization: the rise of kinship structures along with the categorization of natural phenomena, primitive methods of calculating (beads, sticks, stones), the invention of writing and on through 3,000 years of text collecting to the founding about 300 BC of the library at Alexandria, which at its peak housed some 700,000 items.

The papyrus scrolls of Alexandria gave way to “a new form of document: the codex book, so named because it originated from attempts to ‘codify’ the Roman law in a format that supported easier information retrieval.” That is, you could flip through it, instead of unscrolling papyrus by the yard and scanning line after line. Random access was born, and with it fluency. One of the many odd nuggets to be found in “Glut” is that the first people to learn to read from books were the Irish, courtesy of St. Patrick in the 5th century AD, which may explain something about Joyce, Yeats, Synge, Shaw, et al. Indeed, noting the proliferation of illuminated manuscripts from newly literate Irish monks, Wright asks, “In the archetype of the Irish scribe ... can we recognize a distant ancestor of today’s blogger?”

On his way to our bit-borne and unilluminated glut of knowledge, Wright pauses, of course, at Gutenberg and the little-known reproduction techniques preceding him (people punched tiny holes in manuscripts to speed their replication); the standardization of typefaces (“Roman type became the equivalent of ASCII type today”) and the violence that followed the spread of literacy in Renaissance Europe. “Wherever the printing press took hold,” he writes, “conflict seemed to follow ... a kind of mass social pathology that may have stemmed from the jarring introduction of a linear, left-brain communications mode of thought into what had previously been a predominantly oral and visual right-brained culture.”

Through it all runs the tension between networks and hierarchies as vehicles for organizing information. In the 18th century, this conflict was exemplified by the rival taxonomies of Carolus Linnaeus and the Comte de Buffon. Linnaeus’ “Systema Naturae” was a nested hierarchy, categorizing flora and fauna according to (in descending rank) kingdom, class, order, family, genus and species. He was not the first taxonomist: Wright points out that for thousands of years we had been classifying things (including our own kin) in such nested categories, which he designates “folk taxonomies.” He quotes anthropologist Brent Berlin: “Our predisposition to classify at all is an ancient trait and clearly has an adaptive advantage” -- helping us distinguish, say, what’s good to eat from what’s poisonous and whom to feed it to.

Buffon “eschewed strict hierarchies in favor of ... a ‘natural’ system more reflective of God’s will.” For Buffon, whose system took geography, ecology and behavior into account, the human propensity to classify was far too arbitrary, a desperate attempt to tame nature. Life was no orderly hierarchy but a continuum, in which species were constantly shifting; in this, Wright notes, he prefigured Darwin. But Buffon lost out; it is Linnaeus’ top-down taxonomy, with some modification, that we use today. This is partly thanks to Thomas Jefferson, an amateur naturalist who admired Linnaeus and was annoyed by Buffon’s contention that America’s animals were smaller than their old-world counterparts and thus “degenerate.” The future president, visiting Paris in 1787, had the remains of a 7-foot-tall moose shipped from home and presented it (in not very good condition, thanks to the sea voyage) to Buffon as an example of the superiority of American quadrupeds. Wright remarks that Buffon “was sufficiently impressed ... that he promised to revise his theories” but died before he could do so.

WHICH brings us (after an excursion into the Dewey Decimal System, brightened by the revelation that Melvil Dewey, who was “obsessed with efficiency,” was born Melville and for a time changed his surname to Dui) to the Internet and the World Wide Web.

The familiar figures are here -- Tim Berners-Lee, Doug Engelbart, Ted Nelson -- and some less so, such as Belgian bibliographer Paul Otlet (1868-1944), who created an enormous database he called the Mundaneum. In 1934, Otlet envisioned a time when “the workspace is no longer cluttered with any books. In their place, a screen and a telephone.... Over there, in an immense edifice, are all the books and information [where] the page to be read ... is made to appear on the screen. The screen could be divided in half, by four, or even by ten, if multiple texts and documents had to be consulted simultaneously.” Yes, it could.

The popular conception of the Web is that it has eliminated knowledge hierarchies and democratized the creation and dissemination of information. While this is largely true, Wright points out that the Web is not entirely a democracy. Its maverick forefathers are among its critics, including Nelson (“the conceptual father of hypertext”), who rails against “computerish structures of files and hierarchical directories” and complains that “the geeks have tried to lock the door behind them to make nothing else possible.” He is borne out, Wright argues, by “the emergence of a new ‘priesthood’ of programmers and gatekeepers behind the scenes who still exert control over the technological levers powering the commercial Web.”

Yet in the syntax of e-mail and the proliferation of blogs Wright sees evidence of a return to the old oral tradition, which, on the whole, he seems to endorse: For “tens of thousands of years, human beings have interacted as social animals, following unwritten norms strengthened by kinship [and] 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 symbols.”

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sara.lippincott@latimes.com