IN THE BUBBLE JOHN THACKARA - witz cultural

Literacy 163
In biblical times, a shepherd boy sitting under a tree would ‘‘see’’ more of
that tree than we would today, sitting under the same tree, because he was
not distracted by other inputs. William Horton, a documentation designer,
has to deal with the fact that we are horribly distracted by an oversupply
of prepackaged information: ‘‘The 545 miles of shelves in the Library of
Congress hold over one hundred million pieces of literature, including
twenty-seven million books, twelve hundred newspapers on file, one hundred
thousand films, eighty thousand television and five hundred thousand
radio broadcasts, and a million other sound recordings. Those shelves
bulge remorselessly: Every day of the year a thousand new book titles are
added.’’ 2 Ninety-five percent of all the scientists and writers who ever lived
are alive, 3 and among them they publish twenty million words of technical
information each day. The filtering systems we’ve designed, such as peer review,
are collapsing. More than fifty-five hundred papers a day are being
published. As a former magazine editor myself, this last number struck me
as fearsome until I read that fewer than one-third of these texts are read by
the editor of the journal concerned—and that 10 percent of them have not
even been read by the professor whose name appears in print as its author,
thanks to sterling work by armies of graduate students. 4 A big proportion
of this data explosion is the product of a global science and technology
machine in which specialists of a thousand persuasions write in private
languages for a tiny number of their peers. Virtually none of their output
makes it easier for citizens to engage in meaningful dialogue about the
environment.
Scientific publishing makes a sizable contribution to the bigger picture,
but the manuals of our high-tech society, which are meant to explain how
it works, are an even worse distraction. The quantity of instructions needed
to understand a technological device has multiplied a thousandfold in my
lifetime. The pilot of a World War II Spitfire would consult a thousand-page
manual if it wouldn’t start and he wanted to fix it. By the early 1950s,
the manual for the Spitfire’s more sophisticated jet-propelled successor
had grown to ten thousand pages. This document bloated to one hundred
thousand pages by the 1960s, when avionics as well as jet propulsion had
to be described. Today, it takes one million pages of documentation to
explain how the B-2 stealth bomber works; no one person reads it cover
to cover. The mobility of high-tech navy ships was compromised by this
documentation proliferation: By the 1980s, they were carrying forty tons