Since then the universe has blossomed from a soup of elementary particles to unimaginably many rich worlds with living creatures - us, endowed with the capability to invent new worlds at will in the dimension of our minds, culture and tools.

 

 

Information's natural state used to be one of motion, of activity. Information is generated by interactions, information is interaction, as without comparison, without a context, without interaction, there is nothing.

 

In quantum physics a particle has no identity until it meets another and its superposed wave function collapses. It is like that with all information. Information cannot exist without context.

 

The first recorded information was incidental. For example, a cratered moon records the history of the impacts but it does so by accident, as a by-product of the events, not for any specific reason, it just records.

 

 

 

 

 

 

"The spoken word was the first technology by which man was able to let go of his environment in order to grasp it in a new way." McLuhan.

 

 

 

 

Sumerian bookkeepers needed a way to keep track of agricultural goods. So they used tokens for simple bookkeeping purposes to the development of written tablets on which graphs of the script stand for morphemes of spoken Sumerian. These are thought to date back to as early as 8000 BC, about the time that hunter-gatherer societies were giving way to an agricultural way of life. That was all well and fine for many uses, but many syllables were left out. The first known writing system consistently based on the sound structure of a language was Linear B, a Mycenaean Greek orthography developed around 1400 BC. Writing was becoming more like regular speech. The final stage in the evolution of writing systems was the discovery of the alphabetic principle, the system of building the syllables from their consonantal and vowel sounds. According to the British linguist Geoffrey Sampson; "Most, and probably all, 'alphabetic' scripts derive from a single ancestor: the Semitic alphabet, created sometime in the 2nd millennium (BC)."(Britannica.com) Even closer to speech. But not quite there: Writing: "Form of human communication by means of a set of visible marks that are related, by convention, to some particular structural level of language. This definition highlights the fact that writing is in principle the representation of rather than a direct representation of thought..." (Britannica.com)

 

Since writing doesn't have the precision or accuracy of objective representation, or even a verbatim representation of human perspective, not only are written records in-accurate at the time of writing, it only gets worse as time goes by and language moves on. The context slowly gets stretched away from the information until, at one point, it breaks down entirely and the writing can no longer be understood.

 

 

 

"In the Phaedrus, Plato argued that the new arrival of writing would revolutionize culture for the worse. He suggested that it would substitute reminiscence for thought and mechanical learning for the true dialect of the living quest for truth by discourse and conversation." McLuhan.

 

 

 

 

With George Boole's "algebra of logic"; 'boolean' logic, all mathematics could be be reduced to, and expressed in terms of sets with the notation x and y.The concept Boole used to connect the two heretofore different thinking tools of logic and calculation was the idea of a mathematical system in which there were only two quantities, which he called "the Universe" and "Nothing" and denoted by the signs 1 and 0. Boole had invented a two-state (binary) system for quantifying logic that also happened to be a perfect method for analyzing the logic of two-state physical devices like electrical relays or vacuum tubes.

 

 

And along came Alan Turing who at the age of twenty-four, when confronted with the problems of formally stating what is computable (Hilbert's Entscheidungsproblem) creating the theoretical basis for computation. He invented the concept of the general computer, also called the Turing Machine, which worked on a single continuous stream of input of binary, on/of, pieces of data. The machine would only be aware of the one symbol at a time which would enter, the machines current state and a set of rules or algorithms which had previously supplied to it.

 

 

 

 

 

Are better libraries the answer? No, he doesn't think it's that simple: "The real heart of the matter of selection, however, goes deeper than a lag in the adoption of mechanisms by libraries, or a lack of development of devices for their use. Our ineptitude in getting at the record is largely caused by the artificiality of systems of indexing." Indexing he feels, is not a natural human way to refer to information; "When data of any sort are placed in storage, they are filed alphabetically or numerically, and information is found (when it is) by tracing it down from subclass to subclass. It can be in only one place, unless duplicates are used; one has to have rules as to which path will locate it, and the rules are cumbersome. Having found one item, moreover, one has to emerge from the system and re-enter on a new path."

 

The human mind by contrast; "does not work that way. It operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain."

 

Does he stop there, just complaining? No, Bush offers a way forward: "Selection by association, rather than by indexing, may yet be mechanized. One cannot hope thus to equal the speed and flexibility with which the mind follows an associative trail, but it should be possible to beat the mind decisively in regard to the permanence and clarity of the items resurrected from storage. Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and to coin one at random, "memex" will do. A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 "As technology advances, it reverses the characteristics of every situation again and again. The age of automation is going to be the age of "do it yourself’." McLuhan

 

the computation explosion

 

A modern laptop computer is capable of completing a calculation faster than the light takes to travel from its monitor to your eyeballs. Remember when digital desk calculators seemed impressive? We are seeing the beginning of a snowball effect based on technology which becomes 274,432,000,000 (274 billion!) times more powerful in a single human lifetime -the microchip. And then double that again, only a year and a half later, according to Moore's law.

 

Let's put the speed increase in perspective of one mans career. In 1951 Doug Engelbart had his great epiphany of using computers to augment our capabilities. In 1968 he demonstrated the mouse, windows, hypertext, teleconferencing and most of the other ways we interact with information. From the time Doug started on his quest, in 1950/1 to the time of the demo in 1968, 18 years, computers were already over 4,000 times faster, having doubled in processing capacity 12 times. Today, computers are over 67 million times faster than they were when Doug had his epiphany. In another year and a half, they'll be 140 million times faster. And so on.

 

 

More information has been produced since Doug's demo than in the previous 5,000 years. About 1,000 books are published internationally every day, and the total of all printed knowledge doubles every eight years, according to Peter Large in Information Anxiety. "The world produces between 1 and 2 exabytes of unique information per year, which is roughly 250 megabytes for every man, woman, and child on earth. An exabyte is a billion Gigabytes. Printed documents of all kinds comprise only. 003% of the total. Digital storage is by far the largest medium for storing information and is the most rapidly growing, with shipped hard drive capacity doubling every year. Magnetic storage is rapidly becoming the universal medium for information storage" (Berkeley).

 

By the turn of the century, there were 569 million e-mail accounts world wide (Messaging Online). At least 40 percent of Americans were already then using email. Internet traffic is doubling every 100 days (Interactive Week).

 

Dealing all the information it is taking its toll: Stress costs US industry $200-300 billion annually (Aaron Fischer "Is your career killing you?”). The US National Mental Health Association reports that 75%-90% of all visits to physicians are stress related. Will the solution simply be a great new technology? The workers don't seem to think so. 40% want training to deal with the messages in the UK (Mitel).

 

1990. The first Web browser is developed by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in Switzerland. 1993.  Mosaic, the revolutionary graphical web browser appears, written by Marc Andresen, later to become Netscape.

 

 

 

Web links are conceptually simple. People got it. And we have a true world wide web as a result. Of course, HTML in general, the way to mark-up the layout of pages and HTTP, the way the information would be exchanged, mattered. But the link was the main interactive mechanism.

 

 

 

 

 

We need to ramp up our capability to use this computation more efficiently to deal with the huge volume of data. We cannot naively think we can set our future on automatic. Or that automatic systems can deliver us a better future.

 

The NSA, America's National Security Agency listens to our phone calls, monitors our emails. They have amazingly large amounts information, but they couldn't sift through it intelligently enough - they couldn't communicate internally and externally well enough to prevent the 9/11 attacks. And this is a big outfit. If the NSA were considered a corporation in terms of dollars spent, floor space occupied, and personnel employed, it would rank in the top 10 percent of the Fortune 500 companies (Bamford). They still messed up.

 

You can have search algorithms, like Google uses. But you have to know what to look for. You can access information, but can you check its validity, its timeliness, its relevance? Can you can develop complex, advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) routines to simulate some of your own thinking? And if you can, would you still be needed?

 

 

For this, we need dramatically better capabilities.

 

 

 

 

With Hyperwords readers can select any text on any web page and within a single click or a short keyboard shortcut perform operations on that text, to see different aspects of the text or to make the text do something.

 

For example, reveal the text’s dictionary definition, translations, Wikipdia entry and so on. Readers can also email the text with appropriate citations, blog about it and tag it. And so on.

 

 

 

The next step, liquid information. Information has changed.

 

Remember how originally, information could only exist through direct interaction. Later it could be frozen, or stored through writing. Then is could be thawed in chunks, processed by early computers. With even a regular desktop computer being capable of 3 billion calculations a second, storing tens of billion bits, chunks hardly seem the correct term anymore.

 

 

Previously its identity was in relation to everything else in the physical world. A book is a book.

 

In cyberspace there are new relationships, relationships with less physical constraints. Depending on the forces it interacts with, it can go anywhere, be processed in any way and change into anything: With computers, you can make music from a picture, paint a picture from sound.

 

You can treat any information in any way to interact with any other information. Potentially.

 

Digital information has characteristics far beyond it's name, the ones and zeros, as do you have characteristics beyond your atoms, even your genes. There are only four base pairs remember? But enough of them and there’s something else!

 

With the emergence of Hyperwords, information can be acted on and interacted with as the user sees fit, navigating on whims and intuitions of the reader, not of an author of a different time and agenda.

 

That is the continuos hope. There is a lot of work left. There are still great opportunities to get liquid.

 

"The alphabet was one thing when applied to clay or stone, and quite another when set down on light papyrus." McLuhan