James Gleick’s The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood undertakes the enormous task of narrating the cultural, technical, and theoretical approaches to information over many centuries, from the basic binary system used by African drummers in ancient times through forms of writing and printing. He discusses the major
developments of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including Morse and the telegraph, Babbage and the analytical engine, and gives special emphasis to the theories of Shannon and Turing and those that followed in their footsteps as theorists began to think about information in more quantitative ways. 
 
Freeman Dyson, in his review of Gleick’s book for The New York Review of Books, observes that this quantification of information actually blurs the line between information and data. In discussing the consequence of Moore’s Law in the growth of cheaper and more capacious information storage capacity, Dyson says that in 1949 Shannon constructed a table of the various existing stores of memory. The largest store in Shannon’s table was the US Library of Congress, estimated to contain one hundred trillion bits of information.  “Today," Dyson says, “a memory disc drive storing that amount of information weighs a few pounds and can be bought for about a thousand dollars. Information, otherwise known as data, pours into memories of that size or larger, in government and business offices and scientific laboratories all over the world.” Dyson in effect implies that when you think about information as bits to be stored and manipulated you are in truth thinking more about discrete pieces of data than
what is commonly thought of as information.

Gleick’s book guides us cogently and neutrally through the vast history and theory of information. Yet as he approaches the end he shares more personal insights and experiences with his readers. As he contemplates the today's exponential growth in the US Library of Congress’s store of information, Gleick expresses the confusion and anxiety such massive growth and amassing of data produced, in one’s sense of identity and experience of life:  “As the train hurtled onward, its passengers sometimes felt the pace foreshortening their sense of their own history. Moore’s law had looked simple on paper, but its consequences left people struggling to find metaphors with which to understand their experience.” One familiar metaphor, he suggests, is “the cloud.” “All that information—all that information capacity—looms over us, not quite visible, not quite tangible, but awfully real; amorphous, spectral; hovering nearby, yet not situated in any one place. Heaven must once have felt this way to the faithful."                                                                                                                           

Many today express wonder and awe at the vast network of interconnectedness in the nodes of the Internet. But what really is the nature  of those connections and their structure? “The network has a structure,” Gleick muses, “and that structure stands upon a paradox. Everything is close, and everything is far, at the same time. This is why cyberspace can feel not just crowded but lonely. You can drop a stone into a well and never hear a splash.” Gleick ends his massive work on a note of gloomy uncertainty about the whole phenomenon. Using the analogy of the library for the Internet, he concludes: ”We walk the corridors, searching the shelves and rearranging them, looking for lines of meaning amid leagues of cacophony and incoherence, reading the history of the past and of the future, collecting our thoughts and collecting the thoughts of others, and every so often glimpsing mirrors, in which we may recognize creatures of information.” All this leaves us wondering if there is anything real and vital in that virtual universe.

Earlier this month, The New York Times Book Review published a special issue devoted to technology and its effects on our lives and our books. The editors asked a group of writers what their take was on how the Internet had changed the art of storytelling. Several writers emphasized that they tried to express a sense of modern fragmentation, of some loss of a sense of a whole, as if the continuity of narrative and the idea of life as a journey had been obscured in our current life. Others expressed the need to explain rediscover  the sense of the mystery that is at the bottom of what we call life. They believe the the role for writers is to dig deeper writers into the mysteries and wonder of life, even in this age of technology, when there is so much superficial activity available to us that our experience easily become disrupted and meaning of any sort becomes elusive.  Others note that although corporate economics constantly tries to attract us  with yet another novel technological gadget or twist, the truly successful technologies are those that resonate with the basic experience we have as human beings.

Writer Ander Monson turns all this on its head in an interesting way. Being incessantly bombarded by small bits of narratives, he says,  is to “experience the past  . . .  the distant, darkened past” in the sense that one feels palpably what it was like to be in a labyrinth such as the one Daedalus built for the monster known as the Minotaur according to Greek myth. It provides an ancient analogy for the experience of “ trying to find the line of ascent in a wall of information; the trail of URLs I click through in my morning’s misinforming.” In current terms,
then, the labyrinth becomes the Internet itself and itsendless information.

Pondering this brings him round to the fundamental experience of our contemporary lives today:   “It’s dark down here,” Monson writes, “and lonely. I am drawn mostly, insistently to the human voice. How powerful and necessary the solo voice, the experience of being someone, something else for a little while.” Expressing this experience, Monson declares, will remain what he calls “literature’s killer app” because the act of writing about it is concerned with words and hence “impervious to the threat by everything that’s not the word.”

It is a journey into the darkness not unlike the one that T.S. Eliot described it in “East Coker” as he described his own battle with writing:

“And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate . . . 
And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate . . .
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
 That seem unpropitious.”

Unpropitious indeed are our times. Yet it is heartening to see these writers probing to find the common threads of our experience and try to express what it means to be human today.

The nonstop chatter about the power of the Internet has reached a level of cacophony that is hard to dismiss or even ignore. All sorts of people are fascinated with its ever-growing size, with its ubiquity, with its endless
variety, and, of course, with its “promise.” Depending on whom you listen to, the Web promises specific transformative powers, from the spread of democracy to the end of history, from equal access to all information to a repository of the sum of human knowledge that is utterly unfathomable in its size and breadth. The Web’s decentralized structure itself has even become a model for all sorts of peer-to-peer networks, from which “collective intelligence” will emerge to solve many of the world’s thorniest problems. It’s enough to make you think that
surely the cultural equivalent of the second coming is at hand.

The Web has indeed captured the general imagination, but what is actually emerging is a common living mythology for our time. A major component of any mythology is power of epic proportions, recounted in larger-than-life
stories. Today’s ever-expanding Internet of website nodes offers a story of the power of technology and may well provide a symbol that helps us understand the experience of what is like to live today.

In ancient times, humans constructed mythological symbols out of their physical environment and their way of life. In the hunting and herding societies, animals played key roles in the myths and rituals. In the agrarian societies, the planting cycle provided the focus for myths. So it is not surprising that, in a society woven through with various digital technologies that have changed the way we live and work—as well as the way we think and interact with others—that technology should find a central place in the myths of our day.

And by myths here I mean living, vital myths, which are neither true nor false but through their symbols speak directly to what it means to experience life at a particular time in history. The famous mythographer Joseph
Campbell (1904-1987) spent his life studying, writing, and teaching others about the world of mythologies. Whereas dreams are private myths, Campbell would say, myths are public dreams. Mythologies are really stories that contain archetypal symbols, symbols that have been used in countless inflections throughout the
mythologies of the world.

Campbell found remarkably similar and detailed stories of deaths and resurrections, virgin births, heroes’ journeys, and many other images and narratives. Like Jung and many others, Campbell emphasized that these similarities existed and resonated with so many people throughout the ages because myths originate in the unconscious. They are biologically grounded in the psyche, which Campbell defined as “the inward experience of the human body,
which is essentially the same in all human beings, with the same organs, the same instincts, the same impulses, the same conflicts, the same fears.”

So one key to the powerful attraction to the Web for many people as they approach it from different angles with varying interpretations and emphases, is that the web, which is sometimes called a net, is itself an archetypal symbol that recurs in other cultures and mythologies as a metaphor for, among other things, interconnectedness. One classic mythical symbol is the Hindu “Net of Indra,” or “Net of Gems.” The Net of Indra is an infinite net that contains a gem at every crossing of one thread with another. Each gem reflects all the other gems. Everything is interrelated and everything that occurs does so in relation to everything else. Campbell sees a similar insight in the nineteenth-century philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer’s idea about the shape of an individual’s life. Schopenhauer observed that towards the end of your life you can look back and see a consistent order, a plan, to it. People you seem to have met by chance become important agents in the structure of your life. And you too have served unintentionally a similar role in the lives of others, so that one gathers a larger vision of the unfolding of life “like one big symphony, with everything unconsciously structuring everything else.” Schopenhauer wrote that it is as if a single dreamer were dreaming a dream in which all the characters dream as well, so that everything links to everything else. James Joyce developed a similar theme in his final work, Finnegans Wake.

Campbell also told an American Indian story where the web again plays a central role in conveying the idea of interconnection. An American Indian chief, Chief Seattle, wrote to the President of the United States in 1852
in response to an inquiry from the government about buying tribal lands to accommodate new influxes of immigrants from Europe. The basic theme was one of the interdependence of all of nature: “But how can you buy or sell the sky? The land? The idea is strange to us. If we do not own the freshness of the air and the sparkle of the water, how can you buy them? . . . The earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth. . . . Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.”

Power, light, vastness, interconnection, transcendence beyond the visible—all these characteristics of the web converge in these various images. And this may explain why our electronic web—with its pulsing light, expanding toward some unknown and unseen space, connecting countless people, institutions, and sources of information through an endless array of light-emitting nodes—captures the imagination of  so many today as they dream the dream of life in the here and now. 

As Joseph Campbell always maintained, myths may evoke mystery and awe, their symbols leading forward. They point to clues of the spiritual potentialities of human life. While Campbell said it was impossible to predict what the next mythology might be, any more than it’s possible to predict what one might dream on any given night, he did believe that any new myth would have to take into account the planet as a whole and include the machines of our
modern life. This is the focus of our mythology: the story of the progress of technology, with the computer engineers as our magicians and the web as the source of all knowledge, both our Delphic oracle and the symbol of the interconnected nodes of the human race.

“A functioning mythological symbol I have defined as ‘an energy-evoking and –directing sign.’ . . . Their messages are addressed not to the brain, to be interpreted there and passed on; but directly to the nerves, the glands, the blood, and the sympathetic nervous system. . . . The living mythological symbol  . . . is an image that hits one where it counts. [It] talks directly to the feeling system and immediately elicits a response, after which the brain may come along with its interesting comments.” Myths To Live By, Joseph Campbell

The Sistine Chapel, T.S. Eliot, Manet, Thomas Mann, Bernini, Shakespeare—pick your own favorites. But anyone who has deeply experienced a great work of art understands the power of symbols to move us and even change the way we feel, the way we think, the way we live. Like many others, Joseph Campbell found a lot of similarities between how living mythological symbols work and how artistic symbols affect the  individual. He considered both myths and art as products of the imagination, producing symbols that arise from the unconscious and communicate their emotive power to the unconscious minds of others. Although he did not believe that our society
(in the latter decades of the twentieth century) had any powerful common mythology, I’m not sure he would believe the same to be true today. Things were changing too fast for a mythology to develop, he thought. Yet now it seems as though the very intense pace of change has become a common part of the story of our lives. Images such as the web itself and the multiprocessor have captured the imagination of many. Is it possible that we are in fact developing a new mythology for our time?

In order to see whether functional mythological symbols are in fact developing at all today, it seemed best to first understand fully what Campbell meant by a functioning myth and to see if today’s leading neuroscientists had been able to discover any new insights in the process through which a symbol affects the individual  mind. Nobel Laureate Eric Kandel’s latest book, entitled The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious, in Art, Mind, and Brain, seemed to be a promising place to start. 
 
Kandel chose to study the Viennese expressionist artists at the turn of the last century in order to explore the interplay of art, mind, and the unconscious. He does see a direct correlation between earlier art forms that tried to arouse religious emotions and more modern art that attempts to tap into the unconscious realm of emotions by using primitive (or universal) archetypes in a similar way. Kandel notes that since the earliest cave paintings thirty thousand years ago, virtually all groups of human beings have created images. So even though story-telling and the visual and musical arts do not seem to be necessary for survival, they have been persistently part of human life from the start. Art, Kandel argues, creates a process that can produce “an Aha! moment, the sudden recognition that we have seen  . . .  the truth underlying both the beauty and the ugliness depicted by the artist.” “A great work of art,” he continues, “enables us to experience a deep pleasure that is at once unconscious yet capable of triggering conscious feelings.”
Kandel admits that the real challenges of understanding how the mind works in biological terms remain the crucial goals for neuroscientists in the twenty-first century. The current science of mind cannot explain much about the aesthetic experience, although scientists do distinguish between how the unconscious mind responds to an image, which they say produces “emotions,” and how the conscious mind responds, which they say generates “feelings.” This distinction dovetails with how Campbell described the experience of a functioning mythological symbol, which is initially experienced viscerally and then perhaps later interpreted linguistically by the conscious brain and placed
within a cultural and historical context. The similarities in the processes of experiencing myths and art also helps us see why Campbell contended that in the future it would be the artists who would create the myths and keep them alive: “The function of the artist,” Campbell told Bill Moyers during their series of conversations known as The Power of Myth, “is the mythologization of the environment and the world,” for it is the artist “whose ears are open to the song of the universe.”

“People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I  don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think what we’re seeking is an  experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane have resonances within our own innermost being and reality, so that we  actually feel the rapture of being alive. That’s what it’s all finally about,  and that’s what these clues in myths help us to find within ourselves. . . .   Myths are clues to the spiritual potentialities of the human life.   . . . We need myths [today] that will identify the individual not with is  local group but with the planet.” Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

For many today, the Internet seems to be a powerful presence. Why does it have such a deep resonance within our imaginations? How has it become so central to our contemporary life? And what does that say about the lives we live and our values? People find the phenomenon of the Web full of possibilities. Many believe that there’s something magical in its very existence and that it offers access to knowledge and powerful modes of communication that are fundamentally different from what we have had in the past. There is also the pervading sense that the Internet is changing us, both individually and communally, in very important ways. 

One way of understanding the role of the Internet in our culture is to consider it as a metaphor and potentially part of a mythology that expresses some essence of what it means to be alive today. Many envision the Internet as an ever-expanding, boundless entity with near-infinite connections both to other people and to sources of knowledge. And this powerful pull of the Internet seems to me to come from its similarities both to our sense of our
outer world—that ever-expanding universe of which we are such a minute part—and to our inner world—the endless depth of our own psyche, imagination, and unconscious with its potential links to communal metaphors and myths. Both these worlds, the outer and the inner, are ineffable, boundless, and to a certain
extent mysterious, unknowable. 

The Internet shares these characteristics and hence seems to offer a similar potential for knowledge, insight, even adventure. It’s cyberspace, after all, a place for journeys. One clicks on an icon (our computers do have their own “iconographies,” just as mythologies do). Microsoft Windows offers users an “Explorer” program to cross the threshold into the vast and unknown space called the Internet. The potential seen in the boundless, gargantuan phenomenon of the Web leads many people to make large claims: Kevin Kelly, founding editor of Wired,
calls the Internet a “planetary computer,” a “global computer,” and even a “large-scale sentience” with a distributed and vast intelligence that grows “smarter” by the second as millions of users provide evermore information merely
by clicking on a specific website because, in so doing, they indicate their preferences, their interests.

Is there transcendence here, one might ask, the kind of move beyond our ordinary life toward the ultimate mystery of the universe and the source of life itself? Kevin Kelly and others seem to think this is possible, that there is the promise of ultimate knowledge, the unknowable, in the Internet: “Currently,” he writes in What Technology Wants, “we are prejudiced against machines, because all the machines we have met so far have  been uninteresting. As they gain in sentience, that won’t be true,” Kelly writes. “What technology wants is increasing sentience. This does not mean evolution will move us only toward one universal supermind. Rather in the course of time the technium tends to self-organize into as many varieties of mind as is possible. . . The universe is so huge, so vast in its available mysteries, that it will require every possible type of mind to comprehend it. The technium’s job  is to invent a million or a billion varieties of  comprehension.”

Much hinges on what Kelly means by technium, a word he coined because he found that “culture” was too “small” and does not for him convey a sense of “self-propelling momentum.” (I would point out that the word "culture" is also associated with organic growth.) Kelly reaches towards a new kind of mystical sense in defining his technium: it is “the greater, global, massively interconnected system of technology vibrating around us.” And this is not just
hardware and software, but all “culture, art, social institutions, and intellectual creations” along with this impulse (and here he quite anthropomorphizes technology) of essentially “what technology wants,” which is to generate more technology, more inventions, more connections. For Kelly, as for many enthusiasts of the Internet, the “technium” seems to be alive. But is it? And is it truly self-organizing, or is it just some version of Larry Paige
 standing behind a curtain like the Wizard of Oz?

But the real question at the end of the day about what this technology “wants” is: does it have any place left for humanity and the spiritual potential that Joseph Campbell alludes to when he talks about the myths human beings create out of their own dreams, their own imaginations, their own psyches. Or is this new myth a myth of the machine as an all-knowing  and all-powerful deity—in short, a god? Or maybe it’s just all that smoke and mirrors, concocting something rather more illusory than elusive.

I recently had a chance to revisit a wonderful series  of conversations Bill Moyers had with Joseph Campbell, a renowned and innovative  scholar of comparative mythology, a long-time teacher at Sarah Lawrence, and  the author of many books, beginning with The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1948). The Moyers conversations, called The Power of Myth, originally aired on PBS in the late eighties. But now, even twenty-five years later, there is much
rich, relevant material in those programs and in a companion book that includes all twenty-four hours of those talks, which were whittled down to a mere six hours for the PBS series itself. 

Campbell and Moyers spoke over a period of two years at George Lukas’s Skywalker Ranch and later at the Museum of Natural History in New York. In the course of their talks, Joseph Campbell repeated several times in
different contexts that our contemporary life had no relevant myths. Things were changing too fast, he believed, for a mythology to form. He defined myths as metaphors, stories that harmonize our lives with reality. They express the experience of living in terms that are appropriate for a specific time. But our lives have essentially been demythologized in the latter part of the twentieth century (and perhaps even earlier). Yet the old myths are still useful as guides, Campbell always maintained; they provide messages and hints about what  it means to be alive. 

Various journalists, scholars, and innovative thinkers today are writing about the nature of our life today and how we can accommodate the prevailing technology and flood of information and live successfully amid all of it. In effect, they are attempting to articulate various parts of the dominant symbols, metaphors, and stories—a mythology of sorts for today. And so  I thought it would be interesting to use this blog to explore some these  writings within the context of mythology as Campbell defined it and to bring some of his wisdom to bear on the problem of how we live in this world of the early twenty-first century.

One of the most powerful symbols of our time is of  course the Internet, also known as the World Wide Web or just the Web, and it is having a profound influence on the way we think about things. Daniel Weinberger, whose book Too Big to Know I reviewed on January 24th of this year the shape and nature of knowledge: Human knowledge, Weinberger argues, is assuming the shape of—and the scale of—the Internet. One solution to the resulting information overload, then, is to build not hierarchies but networks. Weinberger claims this is a serious shift in knowledge itself (although I believe it may be more of a shift in our approach to perceiving and manage information). Weinberger writes: “The Internet’s abundant capacity has removed the old artificial constraints on publishing—including getting our content checked and verified.”In case you don’t think this is necessarily a good thing, he expands on this vision: “The new strategy of publishing everything we find thus results in an immense cloud of data, free of theory, published before verified, and available to anyone with an Internet connection.”

This may sound a bit like the Wikipedia version of knowledge, but with less rigorous rules. In fact, it closely  resembles a free-for-all of  knowledge. Weinberger sees the structure of the Internet changing our  understanding of scientific facts. He claims that authority no longer reigns, even in scientific research, because truth is always being debated and revised. But that has been the nature of science for centuries, as science learns more and more about the world around us. Weinberger claims we can best learn to use the Net by understanding that authority, or the truth, is “the last page in the linked chain you visit” does not follow. But this seems to be to be more whimsy
than anything else. In fact, given the uneven level of the quality of information one can find on the Internet, it simply doesn’t make sense to say that the last page is the final word on a given topic. The last page could be
completely specious, contradicting many highly informative pages that preceded  it. 

The idea that only now is knowledge networked is also very questionable. As C.W. Anderson points out in his review in The Atlantic of Too Big To Know, knowledge has always been networked, just not electronically. Using the example of finding the population of Pittsburg in 1983 in an almanac, Anderson writes: “What do
almanacs, census bureaus, government funding streams, volunteers, the notebooks volunteers carry, and libraries amount to, if not a network?” So too I would point out that learning has never been a linear process. As one researches a topic, one might move from a chapter in one book to a journal article to three books on the topic and on and on until one is satisfied of the grasp of the knowledge available. It wasn’t as easy as clicking on links but it was always a process of exploration with some serendipity and surprise always bound to be part of the experience. 

Nevertheless, Weinberger’s whole thesis is representative of a growing body of literature that derives its energy, its
vision, and its sense of mystery (often verging on mysticism) from the image of the Internet, and this phenomenon in itself bears more close examination. Is this the beginning of a new mythology, a new set of symbols and stories that help us explain to ourselves and each other what it means to experience life today?  Or is it just an overreaction to a powerful but essentially mechanistic intrusion of new electronic capabilities into our environment? Moyers writes that the last time he saw Joseph Campbell, he asked him if he still believed “that we are at this moment participating in one of the very greatest leaps of the human spirit to a knowledge not only of outside nature but also of our own deep inward mystery.” Campbell thought about that for a moment and then replied, “The greatest ever.”
Perhaps the next phase is always the greatest ever, when it comes to science.  I’m not sure our grounding in our own human spirits though is making a comparable leap forward however. 
See also:  Joseph Campbell Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving his memory and  works, including making available a large collection on work unpublished during his lifetime.
  .