Information Ages: Literacy, Numeracy, and the Computer Revolution, and: How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (review)

There are already several excellent histories of informatics, a term covering the disciplinary matrix of theories, technologies, and cultural relations of information. Despite the chronology implied in their titles, Michael E. Hobart and Zachary S. Schiff's Information Ages and N. Katherine Hayles's How We Became Posthuman are not histories of this sort, or not simply so. The fascination and success of both these books, to a greater or lesser degree, lies in their reflexive implication of information in the very possibility of history: these are not only histories of information, but instances of informatics as history. Hobart and Schiff offer a much-needed historicizing of the concept of information, while Hayles once again sets the standard for science and technology studies with an informed account of our becoming-virtual. Both books arrive at certain logical impasses, which are less shortcomings than illuminations of the nonintersection of history and information theory.

Information Ages is the more ambitious in historical scope as well as in transdisciplinary ambitions. Written against the grain of proclamations that the contemporary is the "information age," the target is the immediacy of the present: the sense that pretechnological, preinformatic history culminates in our age of information and information technologies. We use information as a metaphor that appears to grasp all that can be known, a "general principle of organized phenomena" (p. 3) from social systems to subatomic quarks. Hobart and Schiff displace this self-understanding for a scheme of "information ages" in the plural. In doing so, they trace the changing semantics of information, establishing the historical a priori for the contemporary information age. The book is driven by classification, already evident in the tripartite schema of the subtitle: three information ages (classical, modern, contemporary), each exemplified by a technology (writing, print, computers), and by certain essential features (wisdom and classification, knowledge and analysis, technique and play). This classifying mode is further reinforced by textbook-like examples of characteristic problems and methods from each information age, whether the basics of Aristotelian logic, differential calculus, or computer programming. This is one of the virtues of the book—which indeed reads as a textbook, relegating scholarly apparatus to a bibliographical essay at the end and focusing on a fluid and persuasive presentation of the narrative of the history of information. No new research is offered; the purpose is synthetic and didactic, a constellation of materials as proof of its history of information.

Interestingly, the impulse to classify is itself a reflection of the information technologies identified with literacy and alphabetization. While Hobart and Schiff point to an increasing abstraction in the history of information, the narrative of information's history begins with an initial abstraction: the doubleness of the written mark, which differentiates itself from itself in the moment of inscription. The history of information is inseparable from that of literacy, and the complexities of numeracy and digitization dealt with later in the book elaborate the initial historical implications of information. For Hobart and Schiff, the history of information is marked by a discontinuity with a preliterate, oral culture where information did not exist. They argue that collective memory in oral cultures remained specific to rites of commemoration, participation, and immanent modes of consensus making. By contrast, a combination of reflection and abstraction with distance or displacement will mark the history of information. Such a fundamental distinction places the origins of information within history, while at the same time relegating the preinformation age to what could not be recorded and recalled—that is, to what is not available as historical information. The history of information is its own reflexive precondition set against this shadowy prehistoric backdrop...