Our brains are so dependent on the constant flow of information, if we were to shut someone in a perfectly dark and silent room, they would soon start producing it themselves.
By Łukasz Lamża
The term “information society” reached peak popularity during the 1990s, when the newly-invented internet was sweeping over the world. Today we are so deeply immersed in the global network of information exchange, we can barely imagine the time before. We no longer talk about an “information society” because it’s now obvious that our lives are guided by the flow of information. And how could it be any different? “Information society” is simply “society”. Research shows that for growing numbers of people all over the globe their phone is the last thing they see at night, and the first thing they do in the morning is swipe its screen to unlock it – and not just to cancel the alarm. The hypothetical experiment outlined at the start is clearly an extreme, but at the other end of the spectrum is total immersion in the rapid stream of information, much of which is of unknown source and dubious quality. And it’s all the more surprising that it’s not all that clear what the word “information” means.
The question was first asked in earnest soon after the end of the Second World War when computers started to emerge from infancy. It suddenly turned out that precise manipulation of information held the key to incredible power. Claude Shannon, “father of information theory”, coined the term “bit” in 1948. When sending or saving data, we still express it in bits – simple enough, no? Well, no. If I write a sentence a hundred times, it will take a hundred times more space on the disk – but is this equivalent to a hundred times more information?
According to some linguists, text which contains more information is likely to surprise the reader or to narrow their choices. If my mate Pete is always late, then saying “Pete is running late” doesn’t actually contain any information. If the work canteen always serves tomato soup, you don’t need a sign announcing the menu, since everyone knows what they’ll be served. What’s more, the concept of “narrowing down the audience” strongly depends on the code. The statement “Pete is running late” could be a signal for invasion, for example, and different names could denote different times of the planned attack, which of course would first have to be agreed between the sender and the recipient. What about extinct languages, or those we are yet to decode? The Minoan tablets found on Crete date back thousands of years and bear writing in a script known as Linear A – but can they be said to contain any information if the “text” is impossible to read? Who knows – perhaps the mysterious symbols were inscribed as a joke and they don’t even intend to convey any information?
Curiouser and curiouser… Programmers and linguists have little to say about the difference between information and disinformation. For a programmer, the statement “Australia is not much bigger than Radom” contains as much information as the characters that comprise it. Meanwhile, reality shows that disinformation is in fact equivalent to anti-information, and requires a lot of energy to outdo the damage it does. It’s a bit like filling in a hole – we only reach zero once it’s full… But is it even possible to save a file of negative size?
Still, let’s not get too bogged down with philosophy – here are a few bits of something far more useful. In May, the latest Copernicus Festival arrives in Kraków and the virtual space. This year’s events focus on the concept of “Information”. We’ll explore quantum encryption, literature, Big Data and animal communication over communal breakfasts and at discussions, lectures and exhibitions.
Łukasz Lamża
Lecturer and populariser of science. Author of popular science articles and books, and founder of a science-focused YouTube channel of the Copernicus Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies.
Illustration: Victor Soma
A version of this article appears in Spring ’22 edition of “Kraków Culture” magazine.
