COLUMN: An Unfathomable World of Information

understand that for all the information superhighway allows us to see, there is more out there than we could ever comprehend. Let me begin by writing that I'm composing this column on e-mail on a computer with at least three or four different programs and browsers running at the same time, from a computer lab packed with people doing more things than all the full capacities of all our minds put together can comprehend. Let me also say that I'm more than aware that writing on or about e-mail or on or about computers is an old and worn-out hat these days. But I've got to -- we've all got to - read and write about these information technologies. And I'll tell you why I think this. First, let me get your attention with an apocalyptic overstatement. The information superhighway is no road or parkway or interstate at all. The information superhighway is a demolition derby in the dark. It's an unfathomably infinite and intangible intersection of too much of everything and more than any tiny human being can handle. And although everyone might be writing about all of this information technology these days, I just can't understand why I don't see more fear in all of our addicted, enslaved, radiation-burned eyes. Now let me take this down a bit and tell you why I think all this. When I was studying in London, I watched a BBC documentary on the information age. I must admit, as much of British culture-critique tends to be, the show was a bit much -- a bit hyper-critical and one-dimensionally negative. But in the midst of the witch hunt I was watching, Steven Hawkings' electronic voice brought the virtual house down around me. Arguably the smartest man on the face of the planet, sitting in his wheelchair at his desk behind his computer, told the camera that so much of the virtual architecture of our information age is really far beyond the comprehension of those people who are building and using it all. Looking at me from my television screen, Hawkings professed that our technological accomplishments have far out-reached our evolutionary station. Hawkings explained that so much of what we're doing with information technology today is really more than we can possibly know what to do with. We're all just monkeys trying to be men -- trying to transcend our own evolutionary potential. Let me describe this phenomenon another way. I've been working on a hypertext of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein this summer and have been picking up some of the techniques and critiques of this sort of hyper-informational phenomenon. The text, when it's done, will be Mary Shelley's Frankenstein with a library's worth of other primary and secondary sources, photographs, pictures, and movie clips electronically connected to and interjected into it. While adding source upon source to this monster, I happened to pick up a book on the theory of the hypertext which was lying around the computer lab. One of the central issues about hypertexts such as this one, I read, is how much the author's authority is usurped by the readers' ability to "choose your own adventure" through the text. How much is the author the creator of a work of art when the reader is the one who orders and re-orders, organizes and re-organizes, structures and re-structures it? I thought about this for a moment and realized it was really very good question. The reader does have quite a bit of power over the text by choosing the path he/she walks through it. But, I thought, there still needs to be an author -- like Shelley or the professor building the hypertext around her work -- to gather all the information. Then I realized what's really the hypertext's most mind-boggling usurpation of all. A hypertext really usurps both the author and the reader alike. The author compiling or the reader reading a hypertext stand before a monster they might be able to build and behold but they'll never be able to fully comprehend or control. No one will ever be able to read a hypertext completely -- to explore all of its avenues and intersections would take more time than any human being has at his/her disposal. And to get back to the internet, getting a grasp on the internet -- really thousands of hypertexts upon thousands of hypertexts -- is an even greater impossibility. Like Hawkings said, the information age, like a hypertext, is more than we can comprehend. We're building massive stores (and stories) of information with so much in them and so many different ways of getting at it that they can never truly be comprehended to their fullest capacities. So what does this all mean? Should we destroy all the computers and burn all the books -- should we storm the castle and kill the monster? Absolutely not. The information age and all its technologies, texts, and resources, are indispensable and hugely educational. But I think it's only healthy to take a step back from all this and see how big it is -- and how small we are - before we go on with it all. I think that after we've gotten over our glee at how much we can do with information technologies, it's important to look at all that we can't do with them. The information age, for all it shows us, is just as important for how it makes us realize how much we can't see. I think there's an important lesson here. Long ago, the western world was so arrogant and self-aggrandizing as to think that our tiny world was the center of the universe. Then someone pointed out that this was not the case and that we were spinning through the ether just like all the other tiny stars we had previously thought were all circling us. And years after this, when this revelation was finally accepted, the way we think about ourselves and others and all those things we don't even know changed forever. We became humble. We thought about relativity and the unknown and how even knowing something isn't as perfect and heroic a control over the world as we used to think. Now we've got these information technologies at our fingertips and we're tempted to think that we've got our world and all that's in it documented and cross-listed and contained in the snares of our World Wide Web. As the wielders of this web, we're tempted again to think we're the center of our universe. But what I'm trying to say is that the information age and all of its technologies should allow us to think about our smallness and contemplate how much we don't know just as much as it lets us feel like we're in control and think we know it all. The World Wide Web might be able to show and teach us more than any other technological tool ever invented, but we can never see all of it and it can never show us it all. Sitting here before this multi-tasking computer in my e-mail account, I'm thinking that one of the wisest statements of human modesty, humility, and self-consciousness is to say, "There is this, to be sure, but there is also the other, the more, the contrary, or simply the different in places and quantities I can't even imagine." I think we should all have fun surfing the web but we should never forget that for each wave we ride there are tidal waves in tremendous numbers we'll never see in this virtual sea and across all of the real oceans on our physical earth.