Duguid 2015

Duguid, "The Ageing of Information"

…in the eighteenth century information deserves to be read as a keyword in discussions about relations between mind and world and between indi- vidual and state. Paradoxically, I conclude that reading information in eighteenth-century context reveals a trajectory similar to ideas of ‘‘informa- tion’’ in the twentieth—from youthful enthusiasm to aged suspicion and circumspection—thus making Foucauldian and Habermasian analysis of both ages quite appropriate…

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This ‘‘arc’’ of information can, I argue, be traced in part to its contend- ing conceptualizations as these expand from processes within minds to embrace both matter within books and signals sent by senses and nerves that in their different ways initiate those mental processes.

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…while at the beginning of this period information was thought of as the response to writing, something in the head, by the end information increasingly meant the stuff in writing or elsewhere that stimulated this response. Thus, when we read of books ‘‘providing information’’ in this period, we must wrestle with the ambiguity that the author might see books as a source of education and enlightenment or as a compendium of facts, or both.

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…ge fund of information,’’ it was particularly fitting that dictionaries—archetypically modular and, in their alphabetized sequence, epistemically serendipitous— came to typify books as storehouses of increasingly impersonal, self- sufficient, modular matter.

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Moving from a process inside the head to the material out in the world that stimulated that process, the shifting sense of ‘‘information’’ also reflected changes in the century’s understanding of the relation between mind and world.

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…as ‘‘information’’ moved out of the head and into the world, and thus from the mental response of the mind’s encounter with the world to include the stimuli of that response, attendant causal assumptions raised hopes about how the mind’s responses might be fore- told and, in consequence, how society could be predictably reformed, the past surpassed and the future assured. Hence, though still self-effacing, by Knox’s day information appeared almost self-sufficient in its ability to transform both minds and mankind.

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The combination was hazardous because, spanning input, process, and out- put, it lent support to the notion, held as we have seen by Knox and Cole- ridge, that information was inherently efficacious and, implicitly, that if you controlled information you could control people.

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partly from the instruction and information they communi- cate to him.’’ Information thus stretched from the stimulus and response of sensation to the processes of social communication, from the signals in bod- ies to the content of books and conversation.

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…ng this necessary information is evident from the incredible number of news-papers and other periodical publications.’’ 46Information was now as much used for the content of doc- uments as of minds, and the path between the two seemed eminently map- pable.

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In all, by the end of the century, conceptions of information expanded to embrace the means of interpersonal communication. In this guise, it was taken to be the sort of self-sufficient and politically important substance that could be harvested by figures like Sinclair, scattered by corresponding societies, transported by ‘‘the public prints,’’ which Cobbett called ‘‘those vehicles of information,’’ and eventually, as Paine reported, carried on the telegraph. 50Socially accessible, it seemed to offer the means for achieving democratic consensus.

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More generally, people used ‘‘useful information’’ to indicate that there was much that, though information, was nonetheless not useful. From such points of view, the enduring question of ‘‘overload’’ could be addressed anew from a couple of directions. Assuming that information was in some way countable (and so inherently particulate), publishers pushed their books as having ‘‘more information than their rivals.’’

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