I am struck by Glieck’s phrase, “In the long run, history is the story of information becoming aware of itself” (12). The span of humanity develops as a whole with the more we find, the more we learn. Our knowledge today is based off thousands of years of contributions by countless people to the collective intelligence of humanity. Our modern formation of the English language is one such example. Glieck discusses how language has evolved through the years from cave paintings to oral culture to the written word to the digital word of codes behind a screen. The language of computers, such as binary code, doesn’t even need letters to communicate — just two digits. As people collect new information, how we communicate is constantly evolving. Our language itself evolves. Prior to the written word or digital technology, there was a lack of permanence to words. They only existed through the memory of the speaker and their listeners. “Now people leave breadcrumbs,” but before that sounds traveled “a few yards and fade[d] into oblivion” (31).
As people were enabled to become more aware because they had access to more words, information trapped to pages, they were able to become more critical. When people “began systematically to gather different print tables in order to check one against the other…they found unexpected flaws” (94). The lingering of words birthed more responsibility. The need for consistency, for rules and standards was demanded because information could be collected and compared through its perpetuity. With these rules, more rules were created. These rules turned into a set of guidelines that created artform and expression – the humanities. For instance, the standard of the novel we know today did not appear overnight. As discussed in a previous class I took centering on epistolarity, it was collections of letters sustaining a narrative that eventually evolved into the formation of the novel. Language has acted as a carrier of information, and as our understanding of language has evolved through the years, so has the sophistication of our information.
If not for language, there would be no information. At a previous college I attended, I took a basic communications class. It was there I learned the story of a boy who was found in the wild raised by wolves. As he had grown past the years of critical language development, he was unable to learn how to communicate through language. Without language, he was unable to understand abstract thought. Information cannot be comprehended without language. The boy had no vehicle in his mind to form thought, ideas. His world existed only in the present moment, driven by what he currently observed with no structure to capture or reflect on it.
Language empowers us to capture information, to think beyond now to the past and future to the information found before us. The development of the written text further empowers us to collect and develop that language. The digital age opens a new realm of possibilities for our language and the development of new language, which leads to further sophistication of information. Information is only as permanent as its container. Information can be irreversibly lost when the books it is written within are destroyed — just look at the Library of Alexandria. With the creation of the computer, the internet, and now the clouds, information has taken on a new permanence. The knowledge previously contained in books is now recorded digitally. Technically, people are now more intelligent than ever with the plethora of information we have access to in a matter of moments. Our abstract thoughts can expand further than before, our understandings of the world more complicated.
With the collection of more information, the more sophisticated information and how it is presented can become. Novels are now digested as ebooks or even audible books. More people are able to create and share language and literature than ever before. As we have become more aware with the information we’ve gathered, so has the technology we store it upon. Computers have their own languages. In one case, Facebook artificial intelligence was able to develop its own language to communicate with each other that wasn’t comprehensible by people. As our technology begins to collect more information as people have done through the ages, will it begin to sophisticate it as we have?
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2017/08/01/facebook-shuts-robots-invent-language/