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A review of Informatica: Mastering Information Through the Ages by Alex Wright (2023) and Knowing What We Know: The Transmission of Knowledge, From Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic by Simon Winchester (2023)

Can the history of how humans organize knowledge help us understand 21^st century information overload? Two readable new books help us address these questions with interdisciplinary narratives: Knowing What We Know: The Transmission of Knowledge: From Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic by Simon Winchester, and Informatica: Mastering Information Through the Ages by Alex Wright.

To varying degrees and slightly different ways, both books review the history of information technologies as a helpful tool. Both cover the familiar chronology from the clay tablets and papyrus scrolls of ancient times, monks in the Middle Ages copying texts in their scriptoria, the 15th and 19^th century technologies that made books cheaper and more common, the development of reference books, and the mid-20^th century innovations leading to modern computers and World Wide Web. Both books are also stimulatingly interdisciplinary, discussing many more historical topics than I’ve mentioned above, but also grounded in science and technology. After these similarities, the books diverge.

Cuneiform tablet
Mesopotamia, circa 31 CE

Although Knowing What We Know is rich in history, it is not chronological. It instead progresses from the learning of information (education) to the storing of knowledge (museums, libraries, and encyclopedias), and then to the dissemination of knowledge, concluding in thoughtful discussion of the implication of new technologies, such as the AI-based Large Language Models (LLMs). These topics are corralled by Winchester’s background in journalism, and the grounding of each topic in precise examples.

On education, for example, Winchester contrasts three striking 21^st century cases. He vividly recalls the woman he interviewed who started a school in a poverty-stricken village in India. Those students’ joyous thirst for knowledge is contrasted against the high-tension stakes in China, where a single exam taken in students’ teenage years determines their job opportunities for the rest of their lives. Winchester’s third example of education is the most striking—that of an illiterate island group whose oral storytelling tradition saved them, alone, from a tsunami.

Winchester progresses to knowledge summarized in encyclopedias, recalling his own love of them in his youth and summarizes the rise and cessation of the leading print encyclopedia of the 19^th and 20^th century, Encyclopedia Britannica. How can complex issues about the leading online encyclopedia Wikipedia, with its vast size and reliability, be better illustrated than by Winchester’s own experience late in his research seeing there that a pioneer of internet technology was listed as having died, the correction of which Winchester learned the next morning on social media?

And so it goes: Winchester focuses on a few extraordinary cases to illustrate each of his points. For the preservation of knowledge in museums, it is the remarkable story of the saving of museum treasures in China during political turmoil, and how the Chinese government has viewed this precious collection. Similarly, the rise of mass media is illustrated by the BBC because, Winchester notes, its style was influential in the development of radio news around the world. This flows naturally to the following chapter’s discussion of propaganda, focusing on the chilling example of the Nazis. His penultimate chapter is about polymaths and, finally, wisdom, focusing less on religion than on whether it was wise to drop the atomic bombs in 1945. The book concludes with the implications of ChatGPT and other new technology for our brains.

Winchester has a remarkable ability to turn what could be a dry recitation of facts into a series of compelling stories, with numbered subsections in each chapter. The one time I felt that he could have used a copy editor was during his overly long digression on Krakatoa, the subject of one of his previous books, though he did make even this topic surprisingly relevant. In his hands, such meandering is usually done masterfully.

Like a well-structured novel, all that came before leads Winchester to his conclusion. His fear is that technology, as currently progressing, can hurt our ability to think for ourselves. Characteristically, he illustrates this with a specific example: the complex skill set he stumbled through when his small boat needed to navigate toward land rather than be lost in the ocean in the days prior to GPS. Can people even read maps anymore? In one of the book’s few missed opportunities, he does not draw an extended parallel to the people who (accurately) decried in Gutenberg’s era that if books were mass produced, people’s ability to remember vast amounts of knowledge would decline, which it did (the skill of modern mnemonists, such as the late Harry Lorrayne, notwithstanding).

If Winchester’s book is grounded in concise case studies, Wright’s contributions in Informatica are science and the history of structured systems for organizing knowledge. These merge when Wright discusses the biological classification scheme developed primarily by Carl Linnaeus, including an amusing anecdote involving Thomas Jefferson mailing the decaying body of a moose to acclaimed scientific theorist Comte de Buffon. Although science is mentioned several times in Winchester’s Knowing, Alex Wright’s Informatica opens with it, following the late biologist E.O. Wilson in speculating about the biological role of epigenetics in human knowledge transmission. Wright compares “networks and hierarchies” in the natural and the human worlds. He sees parallels between creations by groups that are unlikely to have communicated, such as the similarity between the plant taxonomies created by Western scholars and those formed through oral tradition in other societies.

Using more traditional evidence, Wright explicitly links the Linnaean classification scheme to the development of librarians’ attempts to organize books, culminating in the Dewey Decimal System at the turn of the 20^th century. He appropriately refers to this 19^th century arc as “the industrial library,” the creation of more elaborate organizational schemes being demanded by vastly increased numbers of published books, which was in turn allowed by new technology.

Successive chapters discuss early to mid-20^th century utopian information sharing projects using then-existing technology, including index cards and telegraphy, or the briefly famous Mundaneum (an institution that aimed to gather together all the world’s knowledge and classify it according to a system called the Universal Decimal Classification). In Informatica, Wright’s discussion of these utopian schemes does not flow as well as it could, the reader being left to make the connections.

Worse, Wright’s extended history of the developments leading to the modern internet is shoehorned into a subsection of the revised “Web That Wasn’t” chapter as “The Web That Was.” This combination of topics in the same chapter was tenable in Glut, but in Informatica the subsection discusses so many people and inventions, all of whose work made the World Wide Web possible, that it should have been a new chapter. Finally, Wright recycled some of his earlier writing and did not update it, such as referring to CD-Roms and America Online (AOL) as leading technologies. This could have been fixed easily.

That said, the narrative in Informatica is more clearly chronological than in Knowing What We Know, but Simon Winchester is so skilled a writer that his book is generally a smoother narrative despite being more episodic. Except in the book’s outline: I was halfway through the book before realizing that its main chapters had a logically progressive sequence to them, from data acquisition to information display to the uses of knowledge and finally to wisdom. Winchester could have made this clearer earlier in the book with just a few words.

One side topic bears noting: Winchester said in at least two media interviews that his discussion of the racism found in a leading mid-century encyclopedia was edited out of the published version of Knowing What We Know, on the grounds that it would be too controversial or offend too many of his readers. Perhaps it would have, but its inclusion would have been valuable, partly for highlighting the important point that even the most well-respected reference materials can be wrong. While it can be argued that this is excusable because Knowing is not written by an academic scholar, a similar edit was also made in a book by Yale historian Beverly Gage, G-Man, (which I reviewed in an earlier issue of Skeptic), with pages 62–63 twice leading the reader to guess, but never know for sure, which apparently offensive word is represented. The criticism that only elite scholars know about the history of racism will become a self-fulfilling prophecy if that history is not included in popular books.

This article appeared in Skeptic magazine 29.3
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On the other hand, Informatica and Knowing What We Know both have problems with the wording of their titles, and with such vast topics, it would be easy to quibble with decisions on which topics to focus. I wonder if Informatica’s new title could make readers think they are getting a wholly different book, rather than an update of Glut (originally published in 2007), with uneven revisions and only a chapter’s worth of new material? In Knowing What We Know, it’s the last third of the subtitle (“From Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic”) that could mislead: in other cases, the phrase “Ancient Wisdom” has sometimes referred to religious traditions, but here seems to refer more to any ancient writing, and the book’s late discussion of wisdom is not primarily about religion.

The important point shared by Knowing What We Know and Informatica is that greater access to information also presents challenges. Informatica is more theoretical and historical, Knowing being more a historically informed snapshot of our present. Both are stimulating and both are informative.