John Miedema

Information Quake, Pt. 1

In So Many Books, Garbriel Zaid tells us, “The reading of books is growing arithmetically; the writing of books is growing exponentially. If our passion for writing goes unchecked, in the near future there will be more people writing books than reading them.” (pg. 9). Furthermore, to read a book is to ignore 4000 others (pg. 22). It is often said that a person can only read 5000 books in a lifetime. Each book read eclipses a lifetime of reading.

It is a good expression of what I have (pompously) called the Uncertainty Principle of Library Science. In quantum physics, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle refers to the fact that observing one physical property, e.g., position, changes the condition of another physical property, e.g., momentum, such that both cannot be measured at once. My proposed principle has to do with the quantity and quality of books. As long as a book goes unselected, or judged worthy, there is a still a possibility of selecting the best possible next book. But to select one is leave a lifetime’s books unconsidered. One cannot be sure of best quality.

There was a time not so long ago when one could read the Internet. When one reads all the posts in Google Reader, it takes the reader to an “End of the Internet” page. In good humour, it chides, “Go read a book, for pete’s sake.” I scan about 200 feeds a day in Google Reader. There is plenty of good reading to be had on the web, but I find I spend most of my time scanning snippets. It can be good; sufficient quantity has a quality all its own. But every now and then I notice that a day has gone by in which I haven’t read from a book. I find it disconcerting because I know that I prefer slow reading. I suspect this phenomenon is true for many. The web seems to suck in readers, substituting quality for quantity.

The overwhelming and accelerating abundance of information and books available to readers today I call the information quake. Ray Kurzweil is a futurist who predicts that advances in technology will continue to accelerate. He predicts the imminent development of machine intelligence, superior to that of humans. Humans will keep up only by merging with machine intelligence. Of course, in this vision of the future, books, libraries and slow styles of reading will vanish. People will be able to read vast quantities of information, aided by their machine intelligence. Is Kurweil wrong? Maybe the web is an emerging brain. Some people eagerly eat this stuff up; most others have a healthy skepticism.