Technology: The medium is the message

Creation of Practical Electricity Before Edison Michael Brian Schiffer (MIT Press, 2011; $19) Behavioural archaeologist Michael Schiffer investigates electricity technologies before Thomas Edison’s success. He shows why some made an impact while others failed, and the role of scientific authority in determining their fate. Information is the paradigm of our time. Economies that once manufactured goods now create value by processing information. Global flows of money, ideas and news determine which countries engage with global society and which are left silently on the sidelines. A skein of pervasive mobile computing keeps us connected — instantly, continuously, incessantly. James Gleick’s latest book, The Information, examines the genesis of the information society and the roots and consequences of information theory. Gleick is no stranger to demanding scientific topics. His blockbuster Chaos (Penguin, 1987) popularized Edward Lorenz’s mathematics of complexity. He is also the biographer of physicists Richard Feynman and Isaac Newton. In The Information, he highlights the great surge of classifying and calculating often labelled as the industrial and scientific revolutions, and he profiles leading theorists, notably US mathematician Claude Shannon. Gleick acknowledges that the concept of information and its impacts are difficult to grasp, yet explains our fascination with seeing information as the driver of just about everything. Rather than telegraphs or telephones, Gleick begins with ‘t a lk ing’ Af r ican drums. Because African languages had hundreds of sounds, it seemed impossible to European observers that complex messages could be conveyed using drums that made only two sounds, pitched high and low. Yet for centuries, almost all African people could understand the messages that were broadcast by skilled drummers. After decades of European puzzlement, John Carrington’s 1949 book The Talking Drums of Africa revealed all. There was no telegraph-like Morse code within drumming. African languages relied only partly on unitary sounds or ‘phonemes’ and more fundamentally on their intonation. Simply altering their tones could transform the phonemes for ‘he watched the riverbank’ into ‘he boiled his mother-in-law’. With drum tones expressing the rising and falling pitches of African speech, drummers could accurately convey a complex message. And anyone whose ear was attuned could understand it. Using this accessible analogy, Gleick deftly introduces the concepts of information channels, intentional redundancy of messages and the importance of error correction. Gleick’s more technical treatment of Shannon and information theory is a recurring thread of the crucial middle chapters. He serves up enlightening side views T E C H N O L O G Y