Fundamentally he covers the aspects of paper, printing, communications, politics, and the changing societal and religious elements that impacted the “revolution” in the field of “information”.
First, his definition of information is at best descriptive. One must remember that what we see today as “information” may not have been the case held a millennia ago. The author begins by trying to place a definition to information. The complexity here is fundamental. Namely what we may define information as today may not at all be what it was perceived of in the time frame of interest. Moreover, the very word may most likely have had a dramatically varied meaning. Thus, do we use our current understanding applied backwards or vice versa. The author notes:
Today, we are accustomed to speaking of “information” in a detached, antiseptic fashion, treating it as a bland, featureless substance. It is quantifiable, transferable, and shorn of any of the subjective specificities of its content. We speak of information in the abstract, as a “thing” that can be disassociated from the social and cultural circumstances of its creation.
At the same time, we speak of “pieces” of information, discrete packets that can exist independent of the undifferentiated mass.
The Web, for example, is a fathomless reservoir of information, but we also wade into it “looking for information,” specific items consonant with our needs and required for the establishment of knowledge.
In early modern language, the term “information” rarely had this double connotation – while it might be employed to describe discrete packets of information, it did not describe information in the abstract. While the story of early modern information involved progressive levels of abstraction, as we shall see, information remained associated with tangible things: books, letters, notebooks, files, registers, accounts, as well as speeches, sermons, and pronouncements.
The word informatio was typically employed to describe a process of shaping or forming, and often carried didactic connotations, in the sense that it involved “in-forming” (or teaching) someone something that they did not already know. It was something gathered, collated, and then “informed” for the recipient: the delivery of information served to help knowledge take “form” within the recipient.
We still capture some of this connotation when we declare that we share something, “for your information,” with a specific communicative intent to impart on the recipient or listener.
In the late Middle Ages, legal and inquisitorial bodies referred to informatio in relation to the discovery and collection of information for their cases. The word was employed to characterize the empirical facts discovered and introduced in the proceedings, which could then be processed, stored, and referenced subsequently, regardless of the outcome of the case.[i]
Frankly we are left somewhat in the dark as to just what information is now and then. One can think perhaps of a job called Information Specialist. This is an on-line version of a Librarian. One may be looking for something regarding a topic and one seeks the assistance of an Information Specialist. It may be some chemical process, a disease, a legal precedent, a financial matter. Information then is something that someone uses or seeks for some purpose. It is generally purpose drive collection of facts as presented by third parties.
Thus one can ask; do newspaper provider information? The answer generally is that they are purveyors of selected facts and opinions generally reflective of the management of the paper and this managements world views. In effect, it is filtered information at best and propaganda at worst. The classic example would be the plethora of newspapers in New York in the 1950s. Each had a specific political bent and a corresponding target market. Was there information provides? Yes, but highly filterd and crafted to support an underlying political position. Think Hearst.
The author provides and excellent overview from his perspective. Specifically:
1. Paper: The essential element in providing “information” at this time was the near universal introduction of paper. Velum was used for more important documents but paper was used for recording of various things, and ultimately for the use in printing.
2. The use of printing for political speech and in turn motivating various revolutions. In a sense the printing allowed Luther to promulgate his new ideas of grace and predestination and thus overthrow the Rome
3. The recording of nature, its natural events and ultimately the change in the way the universe itself could be perceived. Although not mentioned by the author is full detail are medical discoveries. The author ntes:
The authority of Galen (130–210 CE), whose writings on anatomy were rediscovered (and published in a Greek edition by Aldus Manutius) only in 1525, stood in equipoise with personal observation. As early as 1522, Jacopo Berengario da Carpi (1460–ca. 1530), in his Isagoge Breves Prelucide ac Uberime in Anatomiam Humani Corporis, was declaring that observation was the sole route to anatomical truth. While Galenic texts framed many of the medical questions, the emphasis on observation undermined Galen’s authority. Doctors and empirics were committed observers and recorders of the particulars of case studies, and they regularly shared and compared case records to assemble knowledge and acquire insight.12 In a 1579 medical text, Thomas Muffet (1553–1604) exhorted his readers: “Nor is it ever too late to change to better ways: even in this old age of yours, sell your estates, take to the sea, go abroad, build laboratories, study chemistry, cultivate the new medicine that does not float about on a sea of opinion but is established by the evidence of the senses.”[ii]
Unfortunately, the assault to Galen was commenced in the 1350s at Bologna with the introductions of autopsies of executed prisoners. Many of the Galenic assertions were rebutted by actual examination. Students took note on paper and the results slowly moved to Montpelier, Paris, and Oxford.
4. Writing of Others is discussed. However one could argue it was in the 14th century with Boccacio and Chaucer, using the vernacular, we see writings of self through others. Boccacio relates the people of his times of the 1348 plague which in effect reflect his own experiences while Chaucer relates his understanding of people and his relationship thereto in the late 14th century.
5. Finally the author attempts to bring information to the current time. As if something may have changed, from paper to computers. Yet in my writing of this review I started with the physical bok and then used the electronic version. I would gather a benefit for both Amazon and the author. But the point is that I consumed the physical book, it is filled with notes and my commentaries, whereas I was facilitatd in this review with use of the electronic version. Both were useful and necessary. Physical books from my perspective have a lasting legacy. Ironically my medical books are good for about 5 years while my mathermatics boos aare everlasting. This shows that information has a fungibility depending on what it is used for.
The author notes about McLuhan and his understanding of media. I would counter his view with the following as stated by the author.[iii]:
The medium may not be the message, as suggested by Marshall McLuhan, but the medium of print shaped methods of presentation, distribution, and recombination of information in early modern Europe. It also compelled Europeans to undertake new and different efforts at managing the information issuing forth from the presses…. A different revolution, then. But a revolution nonetheless. It is far too reductive to insist, as McLuhan would have us do, that the “medium is the message.” Nor did the colossus of McLuhan’s “typographic man” sweep all before him. But the medium did matter, and its use did have substantial repercussions for the course of European history. Looked at from the perspective of information, the assimilation of the printing press into European society was a profound agent of change…[iv]
As I had noted in an earlier document, McLuhan meant that as one changes the medium for sending what we see as information, what we then believe to be information is changed. Morover I noted[v]:
As a second perspective of the impact of technology as a dominant driver, we can refer to McLuhan and his development of the concept of media. Drucker has referred to the presentation of
McLuhan's doctoral thesis and McLuhan is quoted as follows (See Drucker, p. 250):
"Movable type, rather than Petrarch, Copernicus, or Columbus was the creator of the modern world view. "Did I hear you right," asked one of the professors as McLuhan had finished reading, "that you think printing influenced the courses the universities taught and the role of the university, altogether?" "No, sir, " said McLuhan, "it did not influence; printing determined both, indeed, printing determined henceforth what was going to be considered knowledge."
This concept later evolved into the medium being the message. In our context it is the fact that both Kuhn and McLuhan recognized, albeit in differing fields and in differing ways, that fundamental changes in technology and technique, call it paradigm or the medium, will change the world view, also the message. It is the importance of understanding the change in the technology, its function and evaluate the possible change that this will have in the world view.
As such, McLuhan’s observation that the medium changes what we see as knowledge, facts, information, changes dramatically as we change the medium for recording and transmission. I would argue that for example, police body cameras and smart phone have dramatically changed the way we perceive police encounters. Not that the new perception is perfect or complete but that the presentation of what is obtained by that media changes our understanding of what happened, thus changes our knowledge.
Now to address another issue presented by the author. In a study of the transition from Aristotelean thinking to more modern thought the author notes:
The hero of the piece for Wright is the English polymath Francis Bacon (1561–1626), who abandoned the art of memory in which he had been trained in favor of an empiricism that rested on observation and inductive reasoning. Bacon recognized the continued importance of memory, but also emphasized practical tools, such as commonplacing, for the retrieval of particulars gleaned through systematic study and observation. These observed phenomena and “facts” were the essential building blocks of knowledge, rather than the forms and categories inherited from the Middle Ages and largely shaped by Aristotle’s speciation[vi].
In reality it was Ockham some two hundered years earlier in his construct of nominalism that led to the abandonment of Aristotelian thought. Moreover it can be argued that Ockham took up his fellow Franscians ideas, namely Roger Bacon, of using facts as observed as a necessary adjunct to logic as applied. Namely for Roger Bacon, in a careful manner, facts preceded logic, and logic resulted in information. Ockhams nominalism eliminated the abstract structure positied by Aristotle. Thus a rose is not abstract, but it is this rose or that rose. That nominalism concept then led to individualism, namely everyone is distinct but equal. This then led Ockham to question hereditary rulers and papl authority, for himauthority descended from the consent of the individuals. A fist for this period.
On almost every page the educated reader may readily comment; “however you forgot about …”
As such this book is a valuable work stimulating the thinking of information qua facts or propaganda. This is especially true in regards to attempts to define disinformation, an au courant ministration of politicos and social platform controllers. If information is an amalgam of provable and verifiable facts, linked in some logical framework, then by its very nature it can be subject to the very verifiability that underlies it.
[i] Dover, Paul M. The Information Revolution in Early Modern Europe (New Approaches to European History) (p. 27-28). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition
[ii] Dover, Paul M.. The Information Revolution in Early Modern Europe (New Approaches to European History) (p. 382). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.
[iii] Dover, Paul M. The Information Revolution in Early Modern Europe (New Approaches to European History) (p. 299). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.
[iv] Dover, Paul M.. The Information Revolution in Early Modern Europe (New Approaches to European History) (p. 349). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.
[v] McGarty, Alternative Networking Architectures, Pricing, Policy and Competition, Harvard Kennedy School, November 1990.
[vi] Dover, Paul M.. The Information Revolution in Early Modern Europe (New Approaches to European History) (p. 25). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.
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