Waves of information
A rising wall of symbols
In California, the beaches have piers. They are about 30 feet high, so you are just a little bit above the water. When you look down at the waves from this perspective, they seem peaceful and gentle. In the water, peaceful and gentle are not great descriptors. These waves have been harnessing potential energy for 1000s of miles. Integrating inputs like wind, gravity, and momentum. Then there is some catalyst closer to shore, a wrinkle on the ocean floor, and the potential energy is transformed into a rising wall of moving water. It’s pure power. Force, motion, and velocity. The way to orient when waves are forming is to pay close attention, and to either avoid the pulse of power from the break, or to position yourself to ride the wave.
Martin Gurri, former CIA analyst and author of the book, Revolt of the Public, uses the wave metaphor to describe the impact of information technologies. The book, originally published in 2014, presents a framework to understand modern politics and society. Commenters have credited him with predicting Brexit, Trump, and to-be-discovered variants of digital populism. His narrative and theory places information at the center of our social world. For example, about the printing press — his third wave of information — Gurri says:
…the arrival of the printing press and movable type was probably the most disruptive of all. The Reformation, modern science, and the American and French Revolutions would scarcely have been possible without printed books and pamphlets. pg 28
Information changes our learning potential, and with new learning opportunities, new ideas and capabilities emerge. Information changes us, and we change everything.
I read Gurri's book in 2019, and it has since colored my view of society, information, and technology. Recently, I received this lecture from Rabbi Jonathan Sacks where he discusses the worlds that words create. He shares a slightly different historical lens on history’s great information pulses. Gurri's five information waves are: writing (eg, hieroglyphics), the alphabet, printing press, mass media and the internet. Rabbi Sacks sees 6: writing, the alphabet, the codex (books), the printing press, the newspaper, and the internet. Mr. Gurri, Rabbi Sacks, and another noted media scholar, Marshall McLuhan, agree: the alphabet is a particularly special invention. First of all, it seems that the alphabet was only invented once, and all modern alphabets are derived from the same original: Proto-Sinaitic script. Since it is so common, it can be easy to overlook how extraordinary this technological achievement is; the alphabet compresses the full range of human sounds into ~26 symbols.
Orienting to the alphabet technology cluster
When considering the combined impact of these information waves, we can conceptualize everything that comes after the alphabet as being in service of spreading its impact.
The alphabet is a protocol. Parchment, papers, and pens are agnostic platforms for individuals to put this protocol into use. One very popular format -- or product -- that emerged was the book. The printing press introduced industrial processes and enabled the alphabet technology to be saturated in society. This saturation enabled widespread reading (and writing) literacy, which created a market for new information products. Most notably pamphlets, newspapers, and constitutions.
We now live in the digital age, yet the analog alphabet remains the indispensable protocol we use to carry information between humans (at least in the western world). If the alphabet is a key input into the information waves crashing around us daily, then we should pay special attention to the second alphabet. The logic alphabet. What played out over thousands of years with analog information technology cluster (eg, alphabet, paper, and the printing press), then the digital information technology cluster has been emerging at warp civilization speed. First the codification of the logic alphabet, then its integration into various software languages, which enable software writers to create all sorts of programs to organize, replicate and spread information. The result is a digital tsunami of information that makes printed pamphlets and newspapers seem like 3-foot waves that don’t have the power to impact anything. But those 3-foot waves did impact things, everything from religion to technology to politics. Now, digital information infrastructure produces more alphabetic and numerical symbols in a given day, than was produced in most of human history cumulatively. Our primary information interface is digital, but we all still rely on that original and analog information protocol: the alphabet.