2012.07.29 珀西-比希-雪莱担心信息过载...在1821年

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TECHNOLOGY
Percy Bysshe Shelley Frets About Information Overload ... in 1821
By Megan Garber
JULY 29, 2012
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That feeling of flooding from facts? It's centuries old.

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The bard of abundance, as depicted in an 1819 portrait by Alfred Clint (Wikimedia Commons)
In 1821, Percy Bysshe Shelley -- poet, dramatist, novelist, activist, critic -- wrote a paragraph that would provide the introduction to 1840's A Defence of Poetry. That essay, which would be published posthumously and which was not so much a defense of poetry as an unabashed celebration of it, found the lyricist creating a case for lyric as political art. It would go on to make the famous declaration that "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world."


Shelley's treatise began like so:

We have more moral, political, and historical wisdom than we know how to reduce into practice; we have more scientific and economical knowledge than can be accommodated to the just distribution of the produce which it multiplies. The poetry in these systems of thought is concealed by the accumulation of facts and calculating processes. There is no want of knowledge respecting what is wisest and best in morals, government, and political economy, or at least, what is wiser and better than what men now practise and endure. But we let I dare not wait upon I would, like the poor cat in the adage. We want the creative faculty to imagine that which we know; we want the generous impulse to act that which we imagine; we want the poetry of life; our calculations have outrun conception; we have eaten more than we can digest. The cultivation of those sciences which have enlarged the limits of the empire of man over the external world, has, for want of the poetical faculty, proportionally circumscribed those of the internal world; and man, having enslaved the elements, remains himself a slave.

What's striking here, among so many other things, is the apparent vapidity of Shelley's initial observation -- the fact that, basically, the "we" in question have more knowledge than we know what to do with. If arguments, traditionally, start with the straightforward to work their way to the striking, then the fact that information overload is the first sentence of Shelley's essay would seem to suggest a certain incontrovertibility to the notion. Epistemic glut, in Shelley's mind, seems to be not so much a proposition as a fact.


The Defence's first passage was pointed out by LM Sacasas, he of Frailest Thing fame. And it's a nice reminder of the continuity, and the reassuring banality, of our current intellectual situation. We might feel overwhelmed, occasionally or often, by all the stuff that is out there -- by the trove of global knowledge so vast that it would seem to defy comprehensibility, let alone comprehension. In all that, however, we are in good company with humans of prior generations. As early as 1550, the Italian writer Anton Francesco Doni was complaining that there were "so many books that we do not even have time to read the titles." The 17th century's Comenius referred to granditas librorum -- the "vast quantity of books" -- and Basnage to the "flood." Gesner, writing not too long after the printing press was invented, bemoaned the "confused and irritating multitude of books."

But just as our complaints have their plus ça change quality, so do their corollaries. We end up finding ways to make the sea of information seem less sea-like. We find ways, essentially, to fool ourselves into a sense of sense-making. As controversial as Shelley's ideas about poetry may have been at the time, they speak also to an enduring assumption: that the workings of human creativity -- the clarity of curation, the filter of poetic understanding -- are what will finally save us from ourselves. Whether we are buoyed by the floods of information or drowned by them will depend on our ability to make wisdom out of knowledge, and knowledge out of data. For humans of the 21st century as much as the 16th, our intelligence is contingent on our ability -- just as Shelley said -- "to imagine that which we know."

Megan Garber is a staff writer at The Atlantic.



技术
珀西-比希-雪莱担心信息过载...在1821年
作者：Megan Garber
2012年7月29日

那种被事实淹没的感觉？它已经有几个世纪的历史了。

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阿尔弗雷德-克林特在1819年的一幅肖像画中描绘的丰饶的吟游诗人 (Wikimedia Commons)
1821年，珀西-比希-雪莱--诗人、戏剧家、小说家、活动家、评论家--写了一段话，作为1840年《诗歌的辩护》的导言。这篇文章将在死后出版，与其说是对诗歌的辩护，不如说是对诗歌不加掩饰的庆祝，发现这位抒情诗人为抒情诗作为政治艺术创造了条件。它接着发表了著名的声明："诗人是世界上不被承认的立法者"。


雪莱的论述是这样开始的。

我们有更多的道德、政治和历史智慧，但我们不知道如何将其付诸实践；我们有更多的科学和经济知识，但我们无法适应它所繁殖的产品的公正分配。这些思想体系中的诗意被事实的积累和计算的过程所掩盖。在道德、政府和政治经济方面，并不缺乏最明智和最好的知识，或者至少是比人们现在所实践和忍受的更明智和更好的知识。但是，我们让我不敢等待我愿意，就像格言中的那只可怜的猫。我们希望有创造的能力来想象我们所知道的；我们希望有慷慨的冲动来行动我们所想象的；我们希望有生活的诗意；我们的计算已经超过了概念；我们吃的东西已经超过了我们能消化的。这些科学的发展扩大了人类对外部世界的统治范围，但由于缺乏诗意的能力，却相应地限制了内部世界的发展；人类在奴役了各种元素之后，自己仍然是一个奴隶。

这里引人注目的是，除其他许多事情外，雪莱最初的观察显然是空洞的--事实上，基本上，有关的 "我们 "拥有的知识比我们知道的要多。如果从传统意义上讲，论证是以直截了当的方式开始的，那么，信息过载是雪莱文章的第一句话，这似乎表明这个概念是无可争议的。在雪莱的心目中，认识论的过剩似乎与其说是一个命题，不如说是一个事实。


辩护人的第一段话是由LM Sacasas指出的，他以《最脆弱的东西》而闻名。它很好地提醒了我们当前知识状况的连续性，以及令人欣慰的平庸性。我们可能会感到不知所措，偶尔或经常被外面的所有东西--被全球知识的宝库所淹没，以至于它似乎无法被理解，更不用说理解了。然而，在所有这些方面，我们与前几代的人类都有良好的关系。早在1550年，意大利作家安东-弗朗西斯科-多尼（Anton Francesco Doni）就抱怨说，"书太多了，我们甚至没有时间去阅读书名"。17世纪的夸美纽斯提到了granditas librorum -- "大量的书"，巴斯纳奇提到了 "洪水"。Gesner在印刷术发明不久后写道，他哀叹 "混乱和令人恼火的众多书籍"。

但是，正如我们的抱怨有其额外的变化，其必然结果也是如此。我们最终找到了使信息的海洋看起来不那么像海洋的方法。我们找到了方法，基本上，把我们自己骗到一种意义上的创造。尽管雪莱关于诗歌的想法在当时可能是有争议的，但它们也说明了一个持久的假设：人类创造力的运作--策划的清晰度，诗歌理解的过滤器--是最终将我们从自己手中拯救出来的东西。我们是被信息的洪流托起，还是被它们淹没，将取决于我们从知识中创造智慧，从数据中创造知识的能力。对于21世纪的人类来说，就像16世纪一样，我们的智慧取决于我们的能力--正如雪莱所说--"想象我们所知道的"。

梅根-加伯是《大西洋》杂志的一名工作人员。