Informatica: Mastering Information through the Ages

by Alex Wright

Informatica —the updated edition of Alex Wright's previously published Glut—continues the journey through the history of the information age to show how information systems emerge. Today's "information explosion" may seem like a modern phenomenon, but we are not the first generation—or even the first species—to wrestle with the problem of information overload. Long before the advent of computers, human beings were collecting, storing, and organizing from Ice Age taxonomies to Sumerian archives, Greek libraries to Christian monasteries.

Wright weaves a narrative that connects such seemingly far-flung topics as insect colonies, Stone Age jewelry, medieval monasteries, Renaissance encyclopedias, early computer networks, and the World Wide Web. He suggests that the future of the information age may lie deep in our cultural past.

We stand at a precipice struggling to cope with a tsunami of data. Wright provides some much-needed historical perspective. We can understand the predicament of information overload not just as the result of technological change but as the latest chapter in an ancient story that we are only beginning to understand.

274 pages, Kindle Edition

Published June 15, 2023

About the author

Alex Wright is a Brooklyn-based writer, researcher, and designer whose most recent book is Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age. His first book Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages, was hailed by the Los Angeles Times as "a penetrating and highly entertaining meditation on our information age and its historical roots."

Alex's writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Believer, Salon.com, The Wilson Quarterly, The Christian Science Monitor, and Harvard Magazine, among others.

Alex is a graduate faculty member at the School of Visual Arts' MFA program in Interaction Design. From 2009-2013, he was the Director of User Experience at The New York Times. He has also led research and design projects for Etsy, Yahoo!, Microsoft, IBM, The Long Now Foundation, Harvard University, the Internet Archive, and Yahoo!, among others. His work has won numerous industry awards, including a Webby, Cool Site of the Year, and an American Graphic Design Award.

Although painfully aware that the last thing the world needs is another bearded, bespectacled Brooklyn writer, Alex nonetheless chooses to live in Park Slope with his wife, two boys, and three banjos.

Reviews

[Christopher Selmek · Rating 5 out of 5]

Informatica was my textbook for a college course - Foundations of Information and Library Science - but its the kind of thing I might have picked up on my own, had I discovered it. Wright is basing this book off of a previous text, Glut, that had become obsolete as information technology advanced at an unprecedented rate. I haven't read that one, but the scope of this book covers the earliest indigenous tribes and gave me a lot of new information about all the various attempts to categorize human knowledge through the ages, and the social disruption that invariably results.

One of the earliest chapters of this book presented me with the insight that our natural tendency to classify livings things into increasingly specific categories arises as a result of our biological human family. Just as we are born with parents, aunts and uncles, cousins and siblings, so primitive cultures early established that lions were not housecats or leopards, but they were in a family together that is separate from the family of bears, fish and birds. This innate tendency to classify things gave rise to a discussion about whether information-seeking is the fundamental characteristic that defines humanity.

My college class skipped two of these chapters, which I came back and read later, so I'm not sure if I got the fully effect of her describing how information technology advanced through the middle ages. But whether humans communicated messages by clay tablets, knots in strings, parchment, printing or digital images, these changes in medium have always resulted in changes to civilizational thought writ large. Fortunately, I ordered a permanent digital copy of this book so I can refer back to it and possibly read it over again once I have earned my degree.