Information overload in literature
2016; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 31; Issue: 7 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/0950236x.2015.1126630
ISSN1470-1308
Autores Tópico(s)Personal Information Management and User Behavior
ResumoABSTRACTThis essay is the first to historicise and give a comprehensive assessment of literary responses to cognitive overstimulation. A wave of post-war writing responded playfully to informatics in a pre-digital period through an engagement with physics, entropy and post-structuralist theory. In an era dominated by neuroscientific revolutions, fiction written in the digital age addresses the pressing information overload debate with a new seriousness, often stressing concerns about the impact on the human mind. Contemporary fictional writing depicts an increasingly immersive online experience that accelerates information processing by human minds under technostress. New phenomena such Big Data and 'infobesity' affect not only writing practice but stretch the mainstream novel form to its representational limits. Mainstream literature is critical of the changing the shape of our lives and minds at the level of content, yet fails to find new forms of storytelling. This essay ends by identifying new writing that unites form and content in innovative ways through storytelling modes that represent the processes we are living through more accurately. We are experiencing a major epistemological shift, and are witnessing the emergence of exciting, new kinds of subjectivity.KEYWORDS: Literaturedigital humanitiesinformaticsdigital mass mediatechnological innovationcognitive neurosciencememory'chunking'anxiety Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.Notes1. Dave Eggers, The Circle: A Novel (New York: Vintage, 2014), p. 497. Originally published by McSweeney's in 2013.2. James Gleick, The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood (London: Fourth Estate, 2012), pp. 303–4. Originally published in 2011.3. Gleick, Information, p. 403.4. Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (London, Sydney and Toronto: Bodley Head, 1970), p. 312.5. Torkel Klingberg, The Overflowing Brain: Information Overload and the Limits of Working Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 165.6. See, for instance, Dave Coplin's 'Distracted By Work When on Holiday? You Might Be Suffering From Infobesity', in the Huffington Post, 17 July, 2014, http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/dave-coplin/internet-addiction_b_5591831.html [Date accessed: 17 October 2014]. The term 'infobesity' entered the Wiktionary in 2014, yet it was already defined in 2009 in the Netherlands by a Dutch advertising agency called YoungWorks who specialise in marketing for adolescents. See http://blog.youngworks.nl/trends/infobesitas.7. Donald E. Hall writes: in the past two decades especially, science and technology have even more dramatically complicated the ongoing discussion of who we are and the extent to which we have agency over the many aspects of our selves. Indeed, given new technologies that allow us to change our physical bodies and augment our abilities in sometimes subtle, sometimes spectacular ways, 'what is the self?' and even 'what is a self' are questions that are becoming even more difficult to answer. D. E. Hall, Subjectivity (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 1188. Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, Volume 2: Disorientation, trans. S. Barker (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), p. 134. Originally published in French as La Technique et le temps 2. La Désorientation by Galilée.9. Will Self, 'What's in a Brain?', Esquire, Film and Book Special, October 2012, pp. 184–9.10. George Steiner quoted by A. S. Byatt in the introduction to Memory: An Anthology, Harriet Harvey Wood and A. S. Byatt (eds) (London: Chatto & Windus, 2008), p. xv.11. Itiel Dror, 'Cognitive Technology', in McGraw-Hill Yearbook of Science and Technology 2013, McGraw-Hill Editorial Staff, see http://www.cci-hq.com/Dror_MH_Cognitive_Technology.pdf [Date accessed: 11 October 2013].12. This current essay has no space to develop this argument in detail, but it starts with Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), and runs through Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media (1964) to, in a contemporary context, draws on the extended mind thesis found in Andy Clark's Supersizing the Mind (2011).13. Katherine E. Ellison, Fatal News: Reading and Information Overload in Early Eighteenth-Century Literature (London: Routledge, 2008), p. 1.14. Alex Wright, Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages (Washington, DC: Joseph Henry Press, 2007), p. 9.15. Tom Standage, The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century's Online Pioneers (London: Phoenix, 1999), p. 166. Originally published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson in 1998.16. Gertrude Stein, 'Reflections on the Atomic Bomb', http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/stein-atom-bomb.html [Date accessed: 9 September 2014].17. T. S. Eliot, The Rock (London: Faber, 1934), p. 7. See also Gleick's meditation in The Information, p. 403.18. See 'History of Bletchley Park', http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/content/hist/ [Date accessed: 9 September 2014].19. J. G. Ballard, 'The Overloaded Man', in The Voices of Time (London: Indigo, 1997), pp. 79–92; pp. 85, 87, 92. Originally published in 1961. The story ends with Faulkner himself disappearing: He had not only obliterated the world around him, but also his own body, and his limbs and trunk seemed an extension of his mind, disembodied forms whose physical dimensions pressed upon it like a dream's awareness of its own identity. [..] Slowly he felt the puttylike mass of his body dissolving, it temperature growing cooler and less oppressive. Looking out through the surface of the water six inches above his face, he watches the water six inches above his face, he watched the blue disk of the sky, cloudless and undisturbed, expanding to fill his consciousness. All last he had found the perfect background, the only possible field of ideation, an absolute continuum of existence uncontaminated by material excrescences. (pp. 91, 92)20. 'Turn it off you grahzny [dirty] bastards, for I can stand no more,' Alex screams in despair. Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange (London: Penguin, 1996), p. 89. First published in 1962 by William Heinemann.21. For a detailed description, see N. Katherine Hayles, 'The Materiality of Informatics', in How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999), pp. 192–221.22. Philip Schweighauser, 'Information Theory', in B. Clarke and M. Rossini (eds), The Routledge Companion to Literature and Science (London and New York: Routledge, 2011), pp. 153–4.23. In his discussion of this hypothetical machine – a black box – with protagonist Oedipa Maas, Nefastis explains he needs a kind of anti-Maxwell's Demon (a 'sensitive') that reverses entropic regression, which is connected to information through metaphor to human culture, behaviour and communication: 'Help,' said Oedipa, 'you're not reaching me.' 'Entropy is a figure of speech, then,' sighed Nefastis, 'a metaphor. It connects the world of thermodynamics to the world of information flow. The Machine uses both. The Demon makes the metaphor not only verbally graceful, but also objectively true.' 'But what,' she felt like some kind of heretic, 'if the Demon exists only because the two equations look alike? Because of the metaphor?' Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (London: Vintage, 1996), pp. 72–3. Originally published in Great Britain in 1967.24. Mark Nunes, 'Error, Noise, and Potential: The Outside of the Purpose', in M. Nunes (ed.), Error: Glitch, Noise, and Jam in New Media Cultures (New York and London: Continuum, 2011), pp. 3–26 (p. 17).25. Ian McEwan, 'The Imitation Game', in The Imitation Game: Three Plays for Television (London: Jonathan Cape 1981), p. 154.26. A colleague of Turner crudely asks: 'Shouldn't you first establish whether the woman can think? It's not something one can take for granted, you know.' McEwan, 'The Imitation Game', p. 163.27. N. Katherine Hayles, 'Information of Noise? Economy of Explanation in Barthes's S/Z and Shannon's Information Theory', in G. Levine (ed.), One Culture: Essays in Science and Literature (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), pp. 119–142.28. Catherine Bernard, 'Under the Dark Sun of Melancholia: Writing and Loss in The Information', in G. Keulks (ed.), Martin Amis: Postmodernism and Beyond (London and New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2006), pp. 117–136.29. Martin Amis, The Information (London: Flamingo, 1995), p. 63.30. David Cronenberg, Consumed (London: Fourth Estate, 2014), pp. 14–15.31. David Foster Wallace, Introduction to The Best American Essays 2007 (New York: Mariner, 2007) p. 6.32. Gleick, Information, p. 8.33. Quoted in David Bawden and Lynne Robinson, 'The Dark Side of Information: Overload, Anxiety and Other Paradoxes and Pathologies', Journal of Information Science, 35 (2009), pp. 180–191.34. Stiegler, Technics and Time, p. 137.35. David Bawden and Lynne Robinson, 'The Dark Side of Information: Overload, Anxiety and Other Paradoxes and Pathologies', Journal of Information Science, 35 (2009), p. 185.36. I would like to thank Dr Stephan Besser for pointing me towards Der Diskurs des Radikalen Konstruktivismus (1987). The original goes: Eine wichtige Einsicht Maturanas besagt, dass lebende Systeme als selbstreferentielle Systeme informationsdicht und strukturdeterminiert sind. Sie haben keinen informationellen Input und Output; sie sind mit anderen Worten energetisch offen, aber informationell geschlossen. Das System erzeugt vielmehr selbstdie Informationen, die es verarbeitet, im Prozess der eigenen Kognition. Siegfried J. Schmid, 'Der Radikale Konstruktivismus: Ein neues Paradigma im interdisziplinaeren Diskurs', in S. J. Schmid (ed.), Der Diskurs des Radikalen Konstruktivismus (Frankfurt: M. Suhrkamp, 1987), p. 24.37. John R. Searle, The Mystery of Consciousness (New York: New York Review of Books, 1997), p. 16.38. Searle, Mystery of Consciousness, p. 17.39. Ian Glynn, Elegance in Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 170. Originally published in 2013.40. Klingberg, Overflowing Brain, p. 3.41. Ibid., p. 41.42. Ibid., p. 63.43. See, for instance, Oprah Winfrey's interview with Franzen: http://www.oprah.com/oprahshow/Author-Jonathan-Franzens-Creative-Process-Video [Date accessed: 10 September 2014].44. See Pico Iyer's essay 'The Joy of the Quiet', The New York Times, 29 December 2011. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/01/opinion/sunday/the-joy-of-quiet.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1& [Date accessed: 9 October 2014].45. See the Dutch television programme Pavlov, http://www.uitzendinggemist.net/aflevering/194763/Pavlov.html [Date accessed: 6 September 2014].46. Ian McEwan talked about his use of Freedom at The Story of Memory literary festival held at UCL, 6 September 2014. See http://thememorynetwork.net/memory-in-the-twenty-first-century/ [Date accessed: 6 October 2014].47. Foster Wallace, Introduction to Best American Essays 2007, p. 2.48. Zadie Smith, White Teeth (London: Penguin, 2001), pp. 510–11. Originally published in 2000.49. Tobias Hill, The Cryptographer (London: Faber, 2004), p. 148. First published in 2003.50. Hill, Cryptographer, p. 100.51. It is the science of concealment, and concealment can be very beautiful. Cryptography can take an alphabet and fold it back onto itself, again and again, like origami, until the letters become numbers and the numbers binary. It can hide the blueprint of a gun in a conversation about snow, the pattern of lights on a train, the genetic structure of a flower. But it can also undo these things. Hill, Cryptographer, p. 148.52. Hill, Cryptographer, p. 116.53. Ibid., pp. 18–19.54. Ibid., p. 254.55. Teju Cole, Open City (London: Faber, 2011), Loc. 168.56. See Antonia Damasio, Self Comes to Mind (New York: Heinemann, 2010) and Dick Swaab, trans. Jane Hedley-Prole, We Are Our Brain (London: Allen Lane, 2010).57. Haruki Murakami, Colorless Tsukurak Tazaki and His Year of Pilgrimage, trans. Philip Gabriel (London: Vintage Digital, 2014), Loc. 1419, 1526.58. Lottie Moggach, Kiss Me First (London: Picador, 2013), p. 86.59. Klingberg, Overflowing Brain, p. 56.60. Dave Eggers, The Circle: A Novel (New York: Vintage, 2014), pp. 411, 413–14. Originally published by McSweeney's in 2013.61. Klingberg, Overflowing Brain, p. 163.62. Will Wiles, The Way Inn (London: Fourth Estate, 2015), p. 119.63. Gilles Deleuze, 'Postscript on the Societies of Control', October, Vol. 59, Winter, 1992, pp. 3–7, original emphasis. See https://cidadeinseguranca.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/deleuze_control.pdf [Date accessed: 12 October 2014]. First published in 'L'Autre', October 1990.64. Wiles, Inn, p. 137, original emphasis.65. Michael Serres, The Parasite, trans. Lawrence R. Schehr (London and Mineapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), p. 126. Originally published as Le parasite by Grasset & Fasquellein in 1980.66. Paul Bloom, How Pleasure Works (London: Vintage, 2010), Loc. 2769.67. Self's work has an aesthetics that works against mainstream, smooth literary modus operadi, which finds it analogy in his depiction of London. In Self's first novel, the narrator remarks: London, or so its inhabitants like to claim, is a collection of villages. I don't see it like that at all. I see the city as a mighty ergot fungus, erupting from the very crust of the earth; a growing, mutating thing, capable of taking on the most fantastic profusion of shapes. My Idea of Fun (London: Penguin, 1994), pp. 303–4. First published in 1993.68. Tom McCarthy, Tintin and the Secret of Literature (London: Granta, 2006), Loc. 324.69. Ibid., Loc. 217.70. Tom McCarthy, Remainder (London: Alma, 2010), p. 5. Originally published in France by Metronome, 2005.71. Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (London, Sydney and Toronto: Bodley Head, 1970), pp. 308–9.72. Tom McCarthy, C (London: Jonathan Cape, 2010), p. 263.73. McCarthy, C, p. 264.74. McCarthy, C, p. 265.75. See Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). First published in 2007.76. Jennifer Egan, Black Box (New York: Corsair, 2012), Loc. 659, 671. First published on Twitter.77. Egan, Black Box, Loc. 255.78. Jennifer Egan, 'Coming Soon: Jennifer Egan's Black Box' (2012), in The New Yorker, 23 May 2012, http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/coming-soon-jennifer-egans-black-box [Date accessed: 8 September 2014].79. Tash Aw, Five Star Billionaire (London: Fourth Estate, 2013), p. 36.80. See Sebastian Groes, 'Please Don't Hate Me, Sensitive Girl Readers': Gender, Surveillance and Spectacle after 9/11 in Nicola Barker's Clear', in P. Childs, C. Colebrook, and S. Groes (eds), Women's Fiction and Post-9/11 Contexts (New York and London: Lexington, 2015), pp. 159–78.81. Naomi Alderman, 'Together', first broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on 7 July 2013. See http://www.naomialderman.com/together/.82. Michael Levy, 'Q & A with Patrick Ness', 8 October 2009, http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/authors/interviews/article/10556-q-a-with-patrick-ness.html [Date accessed: 7 September 2014].83. James Smythe, The Testimony (London: HarperCollins, 2013), p. 94. First published by Blue Door in 2012.
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