(highlight:: The Evolution of Publishing Technology and Information Classification Systems
Summary:
400 years after Gutenberg, printing underwent little change until it became industrialized and mechanized.
This revolutionized the process and led to a massive amount of published information, causing concern in the scholarly community on how to manage it. Figures like Paul Lutlay, Rankinathan, Charles Cutter, and Melville Dewey played a role in the development of modern library cataloging techniques.
Transcript:
Speaker 1
If you looked at the sort of 400 years after Gutenberg, you know, printing didn't really change that much during that period. It was really printing a book was as much as Gutenberg was, you know, of course, you know, kind of a revolutionary innovation. It was still quite time consuming to produce a book. It was mostly a manual process where you set type and then you could like sort of hand crank these pages one by one and stitch them together and it was, you know, certainly faster than copying Manuscripts by hand. But suddenly when that whole process became industrialized and mechanized, it created a huge outpouring of published information that people were really like struggling with. And there was, if you read the literature at the time, there was a lot of concern in the scholarly community about like just this kind of tower of Babel effect of like so much information Being produced. How could anyone possibly make sense of this? And people like Paul Lutlay and other folks I talked about in the book like Rankinathan, the great Indian library cataloger, Charles Cutter, Melville Dewey, of course. This was where sort of modern library cataloging techniques started to evolve.)
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(highlight:: Paul Lutney's 1934 Vision for the Internet
Summary:
Strathany Panitsi, a British librarian, recognized the need for new organizational systems to handle the overwhelming amount of books.
However, Lutlay had a grander vision. He understood that books were just a transitional technology, and he wanted to explore ways to uncover the information within them and create connections between documents.
He even foresaw the emergence of multimedia and imagined a global computer network that would eventually resemble the internet.
Lutlay's forward-thinking ideas make him a remarkable and prescient thinker.
Transcript:
Speaker 1
Strathany Panitsi, the British library, people started to like figure out we need like new systems for organizing all this stuff because it's just getting out of control. And I think what was interesting about Lutlay particularly was he had a much more expansive vision of what this might all lead to. I think that for a lot of the librarians at that time, they were kind of solving the problem in front of them, which was too many books. What do we do with all these books? Where are you going to put them? How are people going to find these books? How can we catalog them in a way that people will be able to do research, make them available, make sure that information is accessible. But what Lutlay started to see was, what started to envision was really kind of a step change in the way we might think about the forms that information might take. His big kind of fundamental insight that came when he was very young, he was like 23 when he wrote a book called Something About Bibliography, a little essay. And he basically had the insight that the book is not the be all and end all of this problem. In fact, the book is maybe a kind of transitional technology, even though it's been around for a long time. And what really interested him was the question of how do you kind of get inside of the covers of books and really start to unearth the information inside of them and to create connections Between documents and within documents so that you could think about a much more kind of networked way of thinking about information. And he began to think also about multimedia. It's not just about books. There were photographs starting to emerge at this time, eventually sound recordings. And then later in his life, audio, even television, he was like, well, really, all this stuff, ultimately, is the universe of information that we need to be thinking about how to manage. And he eventually started to envision this idea of a kind of global network that stitched all this information together that would be connected electronically, that people would Be able to access through little screens, which didn't exist at that time. Like there were no cathode or etudes or microprocessors or disk drives or anything like that. But he sort of envisioned this global computer network that would eventually allow people to have access to something that sounds a lot like the internet. When he was in 1934, he was talking about this. So I just find he's just a really like prescient thinker about the possibilities of what might happen.)
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(highlight:: The Alternation Between Networked and Hierarchical Structures and Their Disruption
Summary:
New disruptive technologies often arise during conflicts between network systems.
The web itself functioned as a loose network, resembling oral cultures. However, hierarchical systems coexist and challenge these networks.
For example, the printing press challenged the power of the Roman Catholic Church, leading to societal disruptions.
Similarly, the web disrupted traditional knowledge brokers like publishers and record companies.
Yet, new hierarchies, such as big tech companies, have emerged. This back and forth between networks and hierarchies is a dynamic that continues to shape society.
Transcript:
Speaker 1
New disruptive technologies emerge. They often seem to happen at this kind of point of conflict between network systems that tend to be flat, associative ways of organizing information. And so for example, you could think of like oral cultures as being very networked. People tend to know people who know people who know people and information flows in a very kind of loose way through networks of association. And a lot of people think the web is like that, or at least the early version of the web was very much just hyperlinks and everything is just kind of a big, you know, bowl of spaghetti that Just kind of like keeps going, right? As opposed to more hierarchical systems where things are organized in a kind of top down way where there's, you know, kind of a top level category and then a subcategory and a subcategory And subcategories under that out of all the way down. And this became a theme that sort of emerged over time is like there is this kind of interesting dance between these kinds of these archetypes and you can see it over and over again in the Kind of tension between, you know, for example, if you look at the Gutenberg era, you could say that there was a very entrenched hierarchical knowledge management regime that was basically Administered by the Roman Catholic Church where there was really, you know, that knowledge was sort of tightly controlled and it was the way it was controlled was very closely interrelated With the organizational hierarchy of the Roman Church and the sort of government hierarchy and, you know, knowledge was kind of handed down, organized into very tightly, you know, Constrained kind of categories. And then along comes Gutenberg and hot on his heels comes Luther with the, you know, with the Protestant Reformation and there's a great book by Elizabeth Eisenstein that talks about This, about how really the, you know, the Lutheran Revolution was powered by the printing press. And suddenly there was this technology that enabled people to like, you know, publish information outside of the auspices or the oversight of the Catholic Church and Luther comes Along with his 99th PCs and then revolution starts and suddenly it's much more of a peer-to-peer flow of information happening and that it became like a kind of paradigmatic challenge To the power of the Catholic Church and led to lots of like bloodshed and revolution and all kinds of things, all kinds of like challenging things happen, but it was a really like a period Of intense societal and societal disruption that was also like a disruption in the flow of information in the world. You know, in the early days of the web, people made similar claims that, you know, the web, this new powerful network technology is going to disrupt the existing gatekeepers and the Kind of knowledge bureaus, which I think has turned out to be true. Like it did, created a ton of disruption for, you know, existing kind of knowledge brokers, like publishers and record companies and broadcast networks, like everything is much more Like fluid now, but at the same time, you know, what you also see in this kind of like back and forth dynamic is often the higher, some new hierarchies often kind of emerge out of these network Systems. And you could say, some people would say that that we're seeing that now, where there was one point in the web, everything was sort of flat and loose and then sort of a new kind of structure Emerges around that. Some people would say that, you know, maybe that has something to do with like the rise of big tech companies. There is this kind of like, you know, tendency for new hierarchical systems to emerge and then they in turn sometimes get disrupted over time by new networks. So, so I was kind of started to explore that kind of dynamic a bit.)
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(highlight:: The Clock of the Tower by Niall Ferguson
Summary:
I highly recommend the book 'The Clock of the Tower' by Niall Ferguson.
It explores the intriguing topic of networks and hierarchies.
Transcript:
Speaker 1
There's a really good book by Niall Ferguson, The Clock of the Tower that actually talks about this exact topic of networks and hierarchies, I would definitely recommend.)
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(highlight:: The Incentive to Create Hierarchies to Make Sense of the World and Control People's Perception of It
Summary:
There's a drive to create hierarchical structures to make sense of the information and control people's perception of the world.
Transcript:
Speaker 2
There seems to be a drive to produce these hierarchical structures both to make sense of the information in the world or the world as represented through the information in it, right? And also as a kind of sort of way of controlling people's perception of the world.)
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(highlight:: "He who controls the categorization scheme controls the narrative"
Summary:
The one who controls the categorization scheme holds the power.
Transcript:
Speaker 2
He who controls the categorization scheme somehow controls the narrative,)
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(highlight:: Are Disruptive Information Technologies Good or Bad? It's a Toss Up
Summary:
Throughout history, major information technologies have caused disruption and violence.
The internet revolution initially brought optimism and excitement, but over time, people have recognized its complex and sometimes problematic effects. Industries like media and manufacturing have undergone massive changes.
It is too simplistic to categorize the impact as solely good or bad.
Transcript:
Speaker 2
I'm going to cite something back to you from the book. So I'm quoting now, you say, we might do well to remember that throughout human history, the information technologies that mattered most rarely left Alsian outcomes in their wake. More often they left trails of disruption, burned out libraries, one civilized nations regressing into illiteracy and episodes of blood curdling violence. And that's a end quote. That's a, that seems to be one of the big takeaways from this history of information technology, like that big disruption. Like you said, the, the printing press brought in its way greater literacy and in some ways, you know, the modern world, but it also brought the religious wars, right? Like this, this kind of upheaval in Europe. And I'm curious about your take on, on the major disruptions that we're living through now, right? Like, I mean, like, like we alluded to earlier in the conversation, we've been now a few decades into the internet revolution. Do you feel with your perspective in history, like you have a read on where things might be going, is this a net good or is it more ambiguous? Yeah.
Speaker 1
So I'm always like very reluctant to try to predict any future. It's, I feel like I'm a much safer ground talking about that. But, but I will say that the, when I wrote the first edition of the book, I feel like we were still in a period of relative optimism about the internet. I think there was still a lot of excitement and kind of a utopian zeal around what was happening that, oh, this is, this is going to be revolutionary. You know, information wants to be free. We're going to, you know, up end all the old hierarchies and it's going to be this brave new world of all this kind of, you know, new businesses and, you know, out with the old in with the New and let's see what happens. And I think, you know, in the 15 years since that, I think that the conversations have shifted. You know, I think people have started to acknowledge, you know, the sort of more complex, you know, it's sometimes problematic effects of this technology that it has created, you know, Some fairly painful disruptions. Like, if you look at, you know, what's happened in like the media landscape and a lot of legacy industries, you know, changes in the, you know, simple example would be like the recording Industry or, you know, you could certainly talk about things, how things have evolved in the news industry or beyond just kind of the media landscape, you know, certainly massive changes In like supply chains and, you know, the global networking of manufacturing and commerce and, you know, it's a complex picture. And I don't, I think it's over simplistic to say it's good or it's quote bad.)
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