Information Overload, Paradigm Underload? The Internet and Political Disruption
| Date | 01 October 2011 |
| Author | Ben O’Loughlin |
| Published date | 01 October 2011 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1758-5899.2011.00137.x |
Information Overload, Paradigm
Underload? The Internet and
Political Disruption
Ben O’Loughlin
Royal Holloway, University of London
The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood by
James Gleick. London: Fourth Estate, 2011. 544 pp.,
£25.00 hardcover, 978 0 00 722573 6
The Net Delusion: How Not to Liberate the World by
Evgeny Morozov. London: Allen Lane, 2011. 432 pp.,
£16.99 paperback, 978 0 14 196182 8
Cognitive Surplus Creativity and Generosity in a Con-
nected Age by Clay Shirky. London: Allen Lane, 2010.
256 pp., £20.00 hardcover, 978 1 84 614217 8
The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information
Empires by Tim Wu. London: Atlantic Books, 2010. 384
pp., £19.99 hardcover, 978 1 84887 984 3
By early 2011 many powerful political institutions
appeared to face a profound challenge. Wikileaks, Anon-
ymous and the Arab Spring seemed part of a trend.
Ordinary people around the world were using new com-
munications media to mobilise for change and in some
cases get results. The Internet – the overlapping network
of networks – enabled an information flux that authori-
ties could not control. This was not a matter of scale, or
direction, or ownership of information. This, for some,
was a phase shift to a qualitatively new form of human
relations. The meaning of power, authority and indeed
ownership seemed increasingly muddy. This created two
problems. First, how could these shifts be understood?
Second, how could a qualitatively different world be
acted upon, by policy makers, activists and others? The
struggle for comprehension was evident when James
Gleick, author of The Information reviewed here, came to
talk at the Royal Society of Arts in London in April. Mod-
erator Nico McDonald asked whether the rapidly chang-
ing scales, velocities and characteristics of information
were creating ‘information overload, paradigm under-
load’. Without a paradigm to understand the present,
how can policy be made for the future?
This is a pointed problem because we cannot stop
making decisions, take a sabbatical and figure it all out.
Policy makers, with guidance from IT companies and the
defence industry, are pressing ahead with new tools,
programmes and infrastructures, even if it is unclear what
will work. Scholars of politics and society seem left behind
or left out (with one exception: Philip N. Howard’s The
Digital Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy). In this
paradigm vacuum, it is significant that none of the books
reviewed here are by political scientists.
All four are worth reading for their provocations to
the general reader as well as to policy makers. Gleick
and Tim Wu each offer historical accounts up to the
present that put the challenges faced today into context.
Gleick tells of how information has been structured
through human history, Wu of how information indus-
tries have been organised through US history. The History
of Gleick’s subtitle is a 5,000-year trajectory of human
inscription, calculation and utilisation of information. This
story of technological and conceptual advances is also
one of social anxieties and exhilarations and commercial
possibilities. Gleick’s account ranges from communica-
tion by tribal drums, the creation of calculating machines
and theorems by modern schemers like Charles
Babbage, Alan Turing and Kurt Gödel and, finally, The
Flood we face today: the information overload stemming
in part from the quantification of life, communication
and matter enabled by The Theory.The Theory refers to
Claude Shannon, whose 1948 paper ‘The Mathematical
Theory of Communication’ led to information theory. For
Shannon we can know how communication works if we
reduce it to the transmission of information. If communi-
cation is mathematical then ‘meaning is irrelevant’ – its
cultural complexities irreducible to modelling. Shannon’s
theory has helped illuminate a range of fields. Biology
becomes the study of how information is encoded as
instructions in DNA; in physics the treatment of matter
(‘its’) as information (‘bits’) helps explain quantum
mechanics; psychology, philosophy, management are all
transformed too. The theory has underpinned the emer-
gence of the Internet and the world of always-on digital
life that people and institutions must navigate today.
Telling human history as a passage of ever more
intense and expanded information makes it seem as if
we were always going to end up with The Flood;itisa
Global Policy Volume 2 . Issue 3 . October 2011
Global Policy (2011) 2:3 doi: 10.1111/j.1758-5899.2011.00137.x ª2011 London School of Economics and Political Science and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
Review Essay
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