Lost in Information

How we lost sight of truth over the span of half a millennia

“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

When did it become ‘the information age’...? Marshall McLuhan certainly reinforced this idea in 1964 when he suggested that “the age of information demands the simultaneous use of all our faculties”, and this timing corresponds conveniently with the rise of computers, to which we all but exclusively associate this term now. It’s rather odd, then, that the Anglican essayist Vicesimus Knox announced nearly two centuries earlier, in 1778, that his time was the “Age of Information”. Since this declaration precedes the industrial revolution (and only just has its feet inside the line of where we like to pretend that the sciences really kicked off) it would seem that there is something of a mystery about information we might be wise to investigate.

The historian of information Paul Duguid traces an ‘arc of information’, drawing attention to the shifts in the meaning of this word. At the time of its appearance in the constitution of the United States of America in 1789, the word meant the effect of a communication - that people would be informed. Writing a century earlier in 1689, John Locke used the term as we would use ‘education’, or perhaps even ‘enlightenment’ - again, stressing the idea of being ‘informed’, an act of communication, although Locke also wrote “for my own Information” which is only ‘communication’ in the most abstracted of senses. Similarly, in 1620 Sir Francis Bacon talked of experiments serving to assist “the information of the understanding”. These examples are a long way from our contemporary meaning, amusingly captured by the satirical news show The Day Today in 1994 with the idea of “a fact, alone and tumbling through infospace”.

The Enlightenment brought a shift in the meaning of ‘information’, which can be amply judged by dropping in upon the household of philosophical power couple William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, the parents of Mary Shelley. The father spoke in 1793 of the need to “collect the scattered information that had been produced upon the subject”, while the mother in 1788 spoke of “information I received from different persons” and “the information which has already reached you.” At this point in time we were already giving up the sense of information being a process of reaching an understanding, and were much closer to the lone fact swirling through infospace. Not coincidentally, I suspect, science fiction is about to be kicked off by their daughter in 1818 (even if it is more traditional to wait for Wells and Verne to plant this flag in the sand), and the word ‘scientist’ appears soon after in 1834.

Over half a millennia, the meaning of ‘information’ was entirely transformed - from a process of education, explication, and enlightenment that lasted until the closing decades of the eighteenth century, into its contemporary role as a hopelessly inadequate substitute for truth. This change is perfectly captured in the words T.S. Eliot wrote for his 1934 collaborative play project “The Rock”. If I may reverse the order of the poet’s concerns, he asks us to ponder what has happened to the knowledge that we lost as we accepted information as this thin substitute for truth. He asks also what happened to the wisdom we lost in our intense focus upon knowing that augured this change in the meaning of ‘information’. Finally, we too may come to ask along with Eliot: what has happened to our lived experience as we endure the relentless distortion of truth that emerged under the dominion of the Age of Information.