Bits

He liked to juggle. He designed impractical unicycles, one with a square wheel, another built for two. He was interested in building the smallest unicycle that anybody could ride. Eccentric, yes. But he saw one hundred years into the future when he coined the term “channel capacity,” the maximum rate data can travel through a medium without losing integrity. In 1948, he proposed that data should be measured in something called bits, a contraction of the phrase “binary digit.” Claude Shannon has been called the father of the digital age. By proposing that information could be measured, he helped to create the world we live in now. James Gleick said Shannon’s “fingerprints are on every electronic device we own, every computer screen we gaze into, even means of digital communication.”

Gleick is the author of The Information, a dense, deeply researched, vibrant window into how we got to we are today. In our Information Age, ideas themselves can push back.

Donald Trump poses with a taco bowl on Cinco de Mayo for Twitter, and the image achieves meme status instantly. Richard Dawkins, another brilliant scientist, coined the word meme to define an idea that behaves like a virus, even capable of mutation. Never before have ideas been as tangible, as speedy, as powerful as now.

Gleick, in The Information, describes the early version of the telegraph — not an electronic device at all, but instead a contraption with wooden arms that would be positioned to send signals to a telegraph station a few miles away. Operators at the next station would position the wooden arms identically to transfer the signal to the next, and down the line. There was a telegraph atop Notre Dame in Paris, because it was the tallest structure around. The wooden arms of the telegraph seem an incredibly cumbersome communications tool, lacking the blazing speed of Trump’s taco bowl meme, but at the time it was a technology faster than sending a rider on a horse.

The same argument of “progress” can be made for the cost of drive space. In 1956, IBM came out with a five-megabyte hard drive that cost $50,000. Now, a gig of space costs about nine cents.

It’s pretty much impossible to get your mind around all that.

I am doing audio and video editing on a laptop more powerful than the rack-mounted computer I used in 1993. I am writing this now on a computer far more powerful than the computers used to send astronauts to the Moon. In what seems like a contradiction, the hardware itself has become so powerful as to become meaningless. The power, now, is in the ideas.

People often complain that the power of computing is used for trivial purposes, like to speedily post Snapchat stories, cat GIFs, and pictures of taco bowls. If you start to measure the power of the ideas transmitted, however, it doesn’t look trivial at all. FDR mastered the stump speech delivered from the back of a train, Kennedy bested Nixon on television, Trump is the master of the Tweet.

The narrative form is small. The ideas, and their import, are huge. (Or should I say ‘UGE.) You can get nominated for political office by the skillful deployment of memes.

On the other side of the ideological fence is a wonderful Kickstarter called Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls. It is spreading faster than Trump’s taco bowl, and it, too, will have lasting import as it will change the lives of many girls for the better by providing role models.

Bits: they don’t care about ideology. Like the hardware, they are powerful, but the ideas transmitted are more so, and moving faster and faster.