1

Inforganizing
Towards A Sustainable Information Revolution

by Michael Pastore

Edition2020p001

Copyright (c) 2020

by Michael Pastore
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Contents

1. The Information Revolution: An Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

Figure A. How Big Is A Brontobyte? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

2. The Road Behind: Aspects of the Information Revolution .............. 8

Figure B. Chronology of Culture and the Information Revolution . . . . . . 10

3. Impact of the Information Revolution on Human Life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

4. Toward a Sustainable Information Revolution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

Endnotes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21

References / Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
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From Babel to Brontobytes —

The Promise of A Sustainable Information Revolution

1. The Information Revolution: An Overview

The Industrial Revolution developed in four phases, until at last it turned to embrace

a new sustainable philosophy and practice.(1) The Information Revolution, a

cornucopia of benefits and dangers, is evolving through similar phases. This essay

explores aspects of the Information Revolution, examines the insights of critics, and

suggests that we are at the frontier of a new era of a "Sustainable Information

Revolution", one that minimizes the harmful effects on human beings, and maximizes

the good.

Four items from the past weeks' news illustrate the promise, paradoxes, and

problems of the Information Age:

— In Bali, a 27-year-old Australian woman, Schapelle Corby, is now in prison,

accused of attempting to smuggle nine pounds of drugs worth sixty-thousand dollars.

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The penalty for a conviction would be either death by firing squad, or life in prison.

Thanks to the Internet, worldwide publicity and support for Corby is making it likely

that she will be able to serve her sentence in a prison not far from her home in

Brisbane, Australia. (1)

— In the lower-tech nation of Afghanistan, a 25-year-old woman was not so

fortunate. Caught in the act of adultery, she was dragged from a hut and then stoned

to death by men in the village.(3)

— In England, this is the latest adolescent fad: teenagers approach strangers —

children and adults — then slap or punch him/her. The assailant uses his cell phone to

take a photograph of the beaten victim, and then — over the wireless internet —

sends the photo to his friends.

— In a Paris restaurant, a chef is stabbed to death by a man he who he had never

met in person, but encountered via the Internet.(4)

What is the Information Revolution? ... I would say that the Information

Revolution is the radical changes in society caused by the overwhelming increase in

technologically-mediated information, including mass-produced books and

periodicals, images, the telephone, recorded music, film, radio, television,

computers, the Internet and the Web.

How much information do we have? ... In the U.S.A. there are 260,000 billboards;

24,000 newspapers and periodicals; 30,000 stores for renting videotapes and DVDs;
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more than 500 million radios; 150 million televisions; more than 100 million

computers. iPod sales are booming. 98% of American homes have a television set;

most have more than one. 100,000 new book titles are published every year; every

day more than 50 million photographs are taken. More than 60 billion pieces of

junkmail cram our mailboxes. (If the envelopes from one year's worth of junkmail

were laid end to end, the chain would circle the Earth more than 400 times.) In 1999

the number of web pages was 50 million. Today (in May 2005) there are more than 8

billion web pages.

All the quantity of information we have now is virtually nothing compared to

what's coming on the road ahead. In the year 1999, we doubled all our information in

only 2.5 years. By the year 2010, the world's information base — all the information in

the world — will double every 70 days.

The chart below (Figure A) illustrates how we have needed to invent terms to

represent the enormous quantities of information that floods the world.

Figure A:
How Big is a Brontobyte?
1 byte (1 B)
1 kilobyte (1 K or 1 KB) Approximately 1,000 bytes
(precisely, it is 1,024 bytes, 2 to characters you see on the screen
the 10th power)
1 megabyte (1 M or 1 MB) Approximately 1,000 kilobytes
(precisely: 1,024 kilobytes, or
1,048,576 bytes)
1 gigabyte (1 G or 1 GB) Pronounced “gig-a-bite”, is
approximately 1,000,000,000
bytes; slightly more than a
billion bytes
1 terabyte (1 TB) 1,024 gigabytes. Slightly more
than a trillion bytes, about
1,000,000,000,000 bytes.
1 petabyte (1 PB) 1,024 terabytes. About
1,000,000,000,000,000 bytes (1 amount of all the world's
quadrillion bytes)
1 exabyte (1 EB) About 1 quintillion bytes
1 zettabyte 1,000 exabytes
1 yottabyte 1,000 zettabytes
1 brontobyte 1,000 yottabytes
6
One character. A character is
any symbol (letter, number,
punctuation mark, blank space,
etc.) that you can type on a
keyboard.
It's about one-half as many
of an 80-column monitor. It's
about one-fourth as many
characters on a typewritten page
(assuming the page is single-
spaced with one-inch margins
and elite type). A novel with
50,000 words (at 6 characters
per words) will need about 300
KB.
It's about the amount of storage
that will hold one 250-page
book, assung that the book has
single-spaced typewrtitten
pages. A CD_ROM holds about
750 MB. A DVD-ROM holds 7
times as much, about 4.5
gigabytes. (that is changing)
200 petabytes is the estimated
information contained in paper
sources: in books, and libraries
and in government and home
filing cabinets, etc.
1 followed by 27 zeros worth of
bytes:
1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000
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The Information Revolution is the child of the Industrial Revolution: it could never

have been born without technologies from its ingenious parent. Like the Industrial

Revolution, the Information Revolution is evolving though four phases. We are now on

the edge of the third phase and at the beginning of the fourth. I have called this

impending transformation "the Sustainable Information Revolution." Fully humanized

and freer from the profit-motive, this technology serves us by nurturing social

changes and personal happiness.

Unlike other Revolutions — the French and the Industrial — the Information

Revolution does not decapitate the old regime, or eliminate a previous way of life.

Despite fears from booklovers, television and the Internet have not destroyed the

book. Last year, worldwide, more than 1 million unique books were published. The

modern printing press is capable of producing paperbacks at the rate of more than

ten thousand per hour.

The four phases of cultural revolutions are:

A) Growth and benefits;

B) Unintended consequences;

C) Awareness and protest (sometimes sparked by catastrophes, threats, or

continual inconveniences); and

D) Change for the better.

The Industrial Revolution brought a higher-quality lifestyle, a larger population,

and a longer life. Along the way, it created poverty, demeaning jobs, and perilous
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global warming. Protest against these conditions — and events like Three-Mile Island —

made us aware of the dangers and the need for change. And at last, ever-so-slowly, we

are moving toward a Sustainable Technology, what Thomas P. Hughes calls "creating an

ecotechnical environment." (5)

This ecological foundation for building and producing things has been

empracticed by William McDonough(6). His book, Cradle To Cradle: Remaking the

Way We Make Things, feels heavier than a normal book. It is heavier: it is made with

a plastic "paper" — no tree was destroyed in the production. The essence of the

practice is to build houses and factories that generate no pollution and no waste. (7)

I now believe that we are on the verge of a new era in the Information

Revolution. When we cross the threshold into this new era, our information

technologies will serve us without the plague of problems and the tsunami of trivia.

Critics have said that the information economy rushes blindly ahead, caring only for

the future and nothing for the past. Perhaps. Yet to understand the information-filled

future we must begin by looking backward at its past.

2. The Road Behind: Aspects of the Information Revolution

Problems with information overload were foreseen by Jorge Luis Borges. In his

cautionary tale 'The Library of Babel (1941), Borges describes a library that contained

all the knowledge in the world. Not merely all knowledge was held there, but all the
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conceivable information, and a detailed history of the future. "When it was

proclaimed that the Library contained all books," Borges writes, "the first impression

was one of extravagant happiness. All men felt themselves to be masters of an intact

and secret treasure." But soon, this "inordinate hope was followed by an excessive

depression." Some of Borges's characters grew frustrated, others went mad. The

library contained everything, but because it was so imponderably vast, no one could

ever find the information that they desperately required.

How has information proliferated so rapidly? ... The chart below (Figure B) shows

how culture has been defined by Toynbee and Postman, and also illustrates what I

call the Information Revolution's eight leaps.

Figure B: 10
Chronology of Culture and The Information Revolution
Years Ago Toynbee's Postman's Comments, and 8 Leaps in the
Taxonomy Taxonomy Information Revolution
100,000 yrs ago Homo sapiens sapiens
10,000 years ago Neolithic Age Tool-using Cultures Tool-making and the invention of
agriculture
5,000 years ago Beginning of Information Revolution 1: Invention
(Mesopotamia) Civilization of Writing
2,500 years ago Information Revolution 2: Books (as
scrolls) in ancient Greece, to preserve
the oral works of Homer
550 years ago Information Revolution 3: Printing
(1464) Press with movable type invented by
Gutenberg. Invention of engraving.
240 years ago Beginning of the Beginnings of Human and animal power will be
(1775) Industrial Revolution Technocracy replaced by machine power. Rural
with the steam engine lifestyle rapidly replaced by urban
invented by Watt. living.
150 years ago Machine-tool ind- Telegraph has 30,000 miles of lines
(1854-55) ustry: machines in U.S. Newspaper uses photographs.
make machines Typewriter in 1860. Transatlantic
(1850) cable in 1866..
110 years ago Motion pictures, wireless telegraphy
94 years ago Beginnings of The book: “Scientific Management“
(1911) Technopoly advocates efficiency and absolute
faith in the machine.
66 years ago Beginings of the Information
(1939) Revolution 4: television.
60 years ago 2nd Industrial Rvltn. Age of systematization begins
24 years ago Information Revolution 5: Personal
(1981) computers for the home: Apple II and
IBM PC. Two years earlier, Russell
Ackoff stated that the U.S. had
moved from the machine age into the
systems age.
12 years ago Info Revolution 6: Mosaic Web
(1993) Browser opens the World Wide Web
2 years ago Information Revolution 7: portability.
(2003) Wireless internet, and go-anywhere
devices: cell phones & PDAs.
0 years ago Beginings of Information Revolution
(2005) 8: sustainabilty. a turning from for-
profit to “sustainable” and open-
source informaton. Blogs & podcast.
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3. Impact of the Information Revolution on Human Life

Here are the 12 Essential Benefits of the Information Revolution.

1. Human rights are protected.

2. Persons with medical problems can connect to other people and information. (8)

3. Technology protects the environment and endangered species.(9)

4. Personal Publishing becomes possible.

5. Internet communities facilitate friendships and romance. A prospective spouse can

easily be found via the Internet, but as one critic noted: "the odds are good, but the

goods are odd."

6. Email is the fastest, simplest, cheapest way to communicate.

7. Communications technologies help to solve and prevent crimes.

8. Information is freely available.

9. Technology enhances the arts.(10)

10. Research flourishes using long-distance collaboration.

11. Distance-learning expands education.

12. Mundane tasks — shopping and bill paying — are simplified.

There are worms in the apple of every technological advance. New technologies

brings consequences unforeseen. Here, then, are twelve dangers and problems that

the Information Revolution has swiftly delivered.

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1. Information is Not Knowledge or Wisdom. The great confusion is the mistake that

information is the same as knowledge or wisdom. Instead of learning how to reason

and to think critically, we generate, accumulate, manipulate, and transmit large

quantities of data.

2. Rise of the Nouveau Priests. People who know about how technology works have

become like priests of the information age. They make decisions about subjects in

which they have little expertise.

3. Creation of An Underclass. The Information Revolution has created an underclass

of technological illiterates. These people may earn less money, and are more likely to

be overwhelmed by the chaos of information.

4. Disappearance of Childhood. Too-much information is a force that harms children

and childhood. Children get too much adult information too fast, and are thrust from

the child world into the adult world before they are capable of managing this.

5. Escape Into the Virtual World. People retreat by hiding in a virtual world, instead

of enjoying and encountering the real world.

6. No Time To Live. Information overload causes stress: the pace of life is faster, we

have too much to do and we are always in a hurry.

7. Decline of Reading and Libraries. Television and the Internet contribute to the

decline of reading and thinking, and in this way dumb us down.

8. Loss of Privacy. Privacy is now endangered, and there were more than one million
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identity thefts in 2004.

9. Digital Vandalism. Myriad and ceaseless threats include spam, viruses, trojans,

online fraud, cyberstalking, and phishing schemes.(11)

10. The Rich Get Richer. The Internet concentrates power and wealth into fewer

and fewer players and large corporations.

11. Technology Muddles Education. Computers in the classroom have been a failed

experiment: we ignore other areas of study.(12)

12. The Myth of Technopoly. Technopoly — Postman's term for a culture that is

thoroughly dominated by technology — carries with it dehumanizing myths: that all

changes are good, and that better technology is the solution to everything.

4. Toward a Sustainable Information Revolution

The Romantic Revolution in literature, beginning with Rousseau around the year 1750,

was more than just a change of style, it was "a sudden expansion of consciousness —

an expansion into realms of sensibility not previously accessible to the human

imagination."(13)

Is the Internet as significant as this?(14) A true revolution does not just give us

better gadgets, it changes consciousness.

What can be done to transform the Internet — an ocean of commerce,

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pornography, and cyberpirates — into a miraculous communications tool that vastly

improves our personal and social lives? What trends point the way to a colossal hope for

this extraordinary change?

Education is the long-term answer. But education under the Bush regime is like

Marie Antoinette under the guillotine. Fortunately, there are trends — in six areas —

that point towared a Sustainable Information Revolution. Some of these trends are

blooming, others are just beginning to sprout.

Six Tasks (and Trends) of Transformation

1) Learn to Live in Multiple Worlds instead of One Screen-World

A healthy person maintains a balance of authentic moments and interactions in

five worlds: personal, for self-knowledge and creative activities; interpersonal with

family and friends; community-oriented, with neighborhoods and town residents;

globally, concerned for the lives of all living beings; and virtually, in

cyberspace.(15)(16)

2) Think Virtually, Act Locally

We should use the Internet not for escape but to build communities: connect

people and projects in neighborhoods. Stephen Doheny-Farina writes:

"Civic networking describes limited, focused, carefully applied efforts

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that attempt not to move us into cyberspace but to use communication technologies

to help reintegrate people within their placed communities."(17) MoveOn.org is

doing just this. From their website they provide information so that local organizers

can gather people for local live events .(18)

3) Manage Technologies With Governing Bodies and Laws

The W3C develops standards and oversees many aspects of web technologies.

Recent telemarketing laws and the "Do Not Call Registry" have been a blessing for

consumers; and anti-spam laws, while far less effective, have been a worthy first

step. Though we shudder at the thought of regulation, many technologies are too

dangerous to leave unchecked. (19)

4) Initiate Weekly Debates About Key Issues in Technology

Best would be in-person debates and discussions held in local libraries. Second

best is what is happening now: the Internet itself is the forum for debate, with

countless discussion boards used to argue and exchange ideas. Another manifestation

of interactive discussion is the web blog: authors post an article, then readers

comment on the authors’ words.

Neil Postman's questions are illuminating: "What need does this technology

answer? How will the culture change when this new technology is introduced to it? Is
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it always desirable for a culture to accommodate itself to the demands of the new

technology?(20)(21)

5) Improve the Technology

Sometimes the solution to a technological problem is a technological fix.

Developers are working on a spam-killing internet protocol that will make it

impossible to send an email with a false address. A similar development would

eliminate phishing. Speech to text software — transcribing 160 wpm — solves the

problem of repetitive stress injuries such as carpal tunnel syndrome.

6) Join the Free Culture Movement

"All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary

values." Strong words, from Marshall McCluhan, and yet one wonders if media should

shoulder all the blame. Is it possible that the true fault lies with technology and

media in the wrong hands? ... Satish Kumar writes: "I am not against technology. But I

am against megatechnology. Technology for profit is a wrong use of technology."(22)

What would technology not for profit look like? ...It would be the Free Culture

Movement, a worldwide collaborative endeavor that is happening right now.

"Free Culture" is a melange of projects that began with Richard Stallman, and

now includes advocates such as Michael Hart, Linus Torvalds, Gilberto Gil, Brewster
 17

Kahle, John Perry Barlow, Eric Eldred, Lawrence Lessig. This movement promotes four

ideas: information and software should be free; collaboration is essential; power should

not be centralized in big corporations; and technologies must be understood in terms of

how they impact all facets of human life.

Aspects of Free Culture include:

Free Stuff. The Internet can give you free information (Wikipedia.org, and the new

and astounding CellPhedia.com, offering free info from your cellphone);(23) free

forums for how-to questions; free ebooks; freeware and open source software (such

as the Firefox browser, and the Open Office suite); free email services; free tools

(such as Flickr.com to store and share your photos and YouSendIt to transfer large

files); free operating systems.(24)

The open source movement is thriving. Firefox browser has been downloaded

more than 50 million times this year.(25)Linux is challenging Microsoft Windows, and

whole nations (Spain, China, Brazil) are switching to Linux. Sourceforge.net

coordinates 100,000 open-source projects and the more than one million registered

users that are developing these. A new Venture Capital Company with 15 million

dollars to distribute to open source developers, was announced on May 21.(26)

Copyright Reform. Eric Eldred has sued the U.S. Government for extending copyright

laws that favor corporations, and prohibit fair use of artistic works.
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Protecting Freedom in Cyberspace. The Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF)

coordinates scores of projects to defend freedom and privacy.

Encouraging Creativity and Personal Publishing. Here is the heart of the movement.

Free Culture breaks the grip of mass media by inspiring and empowering individuals to

create.

The Our Media project (http://www.OurMedia.org) allows writers, composers,

and filmmakers to post their work online for free distribution. This saves an enormous

amount of costs for bandwidth charges.

Lawrence Lessig works at center of the movement, and his book Free Culture can

be downloaded for free. (http://www.free-culture.org). Lessig founded the Creative

Commons project (http://www.creativecommons.org), an alternative to the U.S.

Copyright system. With a Creative Commons license, you can protect your literary

and artistic work, and simultaneously distribute the work for free.

Lessig's article in Technology Review (June 2005) describes one of the seminars

that was part of the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Most participants

housed themselves, at no cost, in tents; and a free software lab was set up inside

huts roofed with canvas. Lessig writes:

"As I listened to the Brazilians explain the free-software lab, I began to realize ...
 19

the lab was not so much about "free software." ... Its aim instead was to help them

build free culture using free software. The lab offered "workshops about video editing,

audio editing, collaboration tools, and online collaboration," all "on top of free

software." But the objective of this teaching wasn't, or wasn't just, better software.

The objective was a different economy for culture. Culture itself, as one Brazilian

explained to me, should be free ..."(27)

In Huxley's Brave New World, infants are conditioned to despise any happiness

that can be obtained without spending money. The Free Culture movement seeks to

change that mercenary habit. If we create our own work, we will not be passively,

mindlessly consuming the mass-produced entertainment. We will be thinking and

acting independently.

Is a Sustainable Information Revolution immanent? ... Reflecting about

uncluttering our mental lives takes us back to Henry David Thoreau. During Thoreau's

lifetime radical changes transformed his native New England. The American

population exploded, new inventions proliferated like sprouting mushrooms, and the

Industrial Revolution was just gathering steam. For Thoreau, reading one newspaper

per week was more than enough. News was trivia that clogged the mind. The human

mind was sacred ground which must be kept clear for its true work — thinking original

thoughts. In his posthumously published essay Life Without Principle, Thoreau asks:
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"Shall the mind be a public arena, where the affairs of the street and the gossip of

the tea-table chiefly are discussed? Or shall it be a quarter of heaven itself, — an

hypaethral temple, consecrated to the service of the gods?"

Two literary icons, Faust and Ethan Brand, learned too late that the pursuit of

knowledge for its own sake can never make us either happy or wise. Our culture hunts

information like Ahab chasing the whale. For every useful fact, our minds are clogged

with huge amounts of trivia, pornography, advertising, nonsense. A balance is

needed, where information, knowledge and technology play the appropriate role in

human life.

Old minds can never manage new technologies. A Sustainable Information

Revolution will put information in its place, and point us toward humane goals that

transcend technological pursuits.

Michael Pastor
May 22, 2005
Ithaca, New York
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Endnotes

1. Critics who pre-envisioned this sustainable direction include Aldous Huxley, Lewis

Mumford, E.F. Schumacher, and Thomas Hughes.

2. Corby claims she is innocent. The judge presiding over her trial has tried 500

previous drug cases, and declared the defendants guilty in every one. See

http://www.youthtopia.com/?p=76

3. The story was not reported until after the murder. In past months, other women in

that country have suffered the same fate.

4. The police who interviewed the killer reported that he "had no psychological

problems."

5. In Human-Built World by Thomas Hughes.

6. An interview with McDonough appeared in Newsweek, May 16, 2005, pp. 40-45.

7. To accomplish this miracle, McDonough uses only materials that can be re-used.

8. A scenario described in The Golem at Large epitomizes the power of people and

information. in 1985, a drug abbreviated as AZT — a possible cure for HIV/AIDS — was

discovered, but an enormous controversy emerged about the testing of this drug. AIDS

activists organized, and then educated themselves about the hard science of this

complex drug and its testing process. In the end, the activists collaborated with

physicians and scientists to radically change the structure of drug testing.

9. A recent article described how China's largest game preserve is now completely
 22

wired so that a handful of researchers can observe the sounds and sights of the Giant Panda: a

few persons can watch the vast expanse of the entire game preserve. Also in the news

recently was the discovery of an ivory-billed woodpecker, thought to have been extinct for

sixty years. Information technology was essential in efforts to protect this bird.

10. For a fascinating account of technology and the arts, see Pinch, Trevor and Karin

Bijsterveld. "’Should One Applaud?’ Breaches and Boundaries in the Reception of New

Technology and Music.” Technology and Culture, July 2003 Volume 44, pages 536-559. Available

online via Project Muse, http://muse.jhu.edu

11. Phishing is sending an email to someone with a URL link that leads to a bogus website,

where their information will be stolen, or their credit card charged. Phishing attacks,

according to Newsweek, have hit 43% of all Americans. Of these, 5% have taken the bait and

been suckered. A commendable effort to educate to prevent various frauds is TeenAngels, at

http:// www.teenangels.org. But do not confuse this with the pornographic .com site.

12. Pathetically short of funds to buy computers, many schools accept bribes of computers and

software for this price: the students need to watch commercial advertisements at their desks

in school.

13. The quoted text is from an essay by Herbert Read.

14. In an interview, I asked this question to Internet expert Harley Hahn. His reply — about

ecommerce – entirely missed the point.

 Pastor 23

15. My idea here is borrowed from Arnold Toynbee, in his 1971 work Surviving the

Future. Toynbee would like us to inhabit three worlds: the local, the global, and one

where artists or scientists connect with like-minded individuals.

16. I have only firsthand evidence of this trend: thanks to cell phones and portable

devices, young persons are spending more time outdoors. I would like to discover if

the numbers corroborate this.

17. From his book The Wired Neighborhood.

18. The MoveOn.org website claims that they have "a network of more than 3,000,000

online activists, one of the most effective and responsive outlets for democratic

participation available today."

19. In a 2003 interview in Fortune Magazine, Bill Joy(author of the famous: "Why the

Future Doesn't Need Us) says: "If I were to propose one thing that we as the human

race need to do, I say we can't let the future just happen anymore. If too many of

the possible futures are catastrophes, we have to try to steer down less dangerous

paths. That implies that you somehow have to manage markets, geopolitics, and

human behavior in the way we have become able to manage the scientific process.

Those are inconceivable things."

20. Postman's questions are from Technopoly.

21. Collaborative democracy is catching on. A news article on May 22, 2005 reported

that in Maine, the governor's staff pulled out names from a telephone directory, and

then with this random selection of 300 persons, organized a debate about the future
 24

of the state's health care program.

22. Satish Kumar, editor of Resurgence, is here quoted in Turning Away from

Technology, page 220.

23. A remarkable new service, around on May 21.2005. From their website

(http://www.cellphedia.com/): "Cellphedia is the 1st Ubiquitous Social Encyclopedia.

This is a cell phone application that promotes the sharing of knowledge. It allows to

send and receive encyclopedia-type inquiries between specific, pre-defined groups of

users, through Text messaging. Users can register here on this site and start building

the quick-reference Cellphedia-type encyclopedia entries, by asking other users and

answering other users' questions where-ever cell phone service is available."

24. It should be noted that Richard Stallman distinguishes between free software and

open source software: the latter can be changed by collaborative effort.

25. Are open source products any good? ... Linux has been rated the best of all the

browswers, in a review on CNET on May 19, 2005. http://reviews.cnet.com/4520-

3118_7-6226062-1.html

26. For more information see http://www.simulaventures.com/

27. Lawrence Lessig, "The People Own Ideas!" in Technology Review, June 2005.
 25

References / Bibliography

The list below comprises the books and articles that I have studied, read, reviewed,

or examined since I began thinking and writing about these themes in 1998. Titles

marked with * were especially pertinent to this work, From Babel To Brontobytes.

*Adams, Henry. The Education of Henry Adams. Privately printed in 1907. Available as
an ebook from Project Gutenberg at: http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/2044
Appleyard, Bryan. Understanding the Present: Science and the Soul of Modern Man.
Picador, London, 1992.
Beniger, James R. The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the
Information Society. Harvard University Press, 1989.
Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Edited by Hannah Arendt. Schocken Books, New
York, 1969.
Bennett, Arnold. How to Live on 24 Hours A Day. Ebook from Zorba Press. Useful to
show that even in the year 1910 when the book was published, people
wondered how to manage the hurried pace of modern life.
Bergson, Henri. Time and Free Will. London, George Allen and Unwin, 1916.
Translated by F. L. Pogson. (originally written in 1889).
Berman, Morris. The Reenchantment of the World. Bantam Books, 1984
*Birkerts, Sven. The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age.
Ballantine Books, 1995.
Berry, Adrian. The Next Ten Thousand Years: A Vision of Mans Future in the Universe.
Mentor, New York, 1974.
*Blumenthal, Ralph. "College Libraries Set Aside Books in a Digital Age." New York
Times, May 14, 2005.
*Borges, Jorge Luis. The Library of Babel. In the anthology: Jorge Luis Borges,
Collected Fictions. Translated by Andrew Hurley. Viking, New York, 1998.
Borges's story was written in 1941.
Brand, Stewart. The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at M.I.T. Penguin Books, 1988.
Brinton, Crane. Ideas and Men: The Story of Western Thought. (2nd edition).
Prentice-Hall, 1963.
 26

Bronowski, J. Science and Human Values (revised edition). Harper, New York, 1975.
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 28

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 30

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 32

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