Glut

Alex Wright

2009, 9780309102384

City of Sydney Library

Really interesting book, looking at how communication, literacy and organisation of information evolved.
We may think networks and hierarchies and taxonomies are relatively recent developments, but Wright shows how they have existed from man's beginnings, as memes and epigenetic rules and that they also exist in other species (ants, bees etc.) Humans need to organise and categorise to be able to survive.
He explains the rise in literacy and the long-reaching effect of mechanised printing and how institutional power is tightly bound to the control and flow of information.

Lots of interesting facts and ideas to think about.

Seems that there's a 'natural' comfort-level settling on 5 layers in taxonomies and organisational systems happening through the ages. Current web heuristics indicate that after 5 hierachical levels on a web site, people just get lost.

Information developments of the past have triggered conflict between literacy and orality. Wright wonders whether the popularity of the internet and social media comes from our deep-seated need to talk. Classed as 'secondary orality' by Walter J. Ong, as it is predicated on literacy.

As part of the book club meet, we spoke to Alex by conference phone, which was excellent and asked whether writing the book had changed the way he worked, he said that it had, as he had been pretty strong on hierarchical organisation of info and he now goes with the middle ground towards networks.

Interesting piece I read recently in New York Review of Books, Michael Massing discusses the future of print newspapers and much ties in with ideas in Wright's book. Massing quotes Clay Shirky "just as the advent of printing helped break the medieval Church's hold on the flow of information, so is the rise of the Internet loosening the grip of the corporate-owned mass media. A profound if unsettling process of decentralization and democratization is taking place."
So as the history circle goes round, I wonder what the next lot of hierachies to come to the fore will be like.