The Daily Beast is running my review of James Gleick’s fascinating new book The Information. Here’s how it (the review, not the book) starts:

At a technology conference last year, Google’s outgoing CEO Eric Schmidt tried to put our current “information explosion” into historical perspective. Today, he said, we create as much information in 48 hours—five billion gigabytes worth—as was created “between the birth of the world and 2003.” It’s an astonishing comparison, and it seems to illuminate something important about the times we live in. But the harder you look at Schmidt’s numbers, the fuzzier they become. What does it mean to create information? When we measure information, what exactly are we measuring? What the heck is “information,” anyway?

None of those questions, it turns out, is easy to answer. Wikipedia isn’t much help. “As a concept,” it tells us, “information has many meanings,” which are “closely related to notions of constraint, communication, control, data, form, instruction, knowledge, meaning, mental stimulus, pattern, perception, and representation.” It might have been simpler to list the notions that information isn’t related to. Dictionaries are a little clearer. They suggest that information is more or less synonymous with knowledge. But that definition no longer seems sufficient. What does a gigabyte of knowledge look like? The fact is, although we live in an information age, we don’t really know what information even means.

Into the breach steps the gifted science writer James Gleick. In his formidable new book, The Information, Gleick explains how we’ve progressed from seeing information as the expression of human thought and emotion to looking at it as a commodity that can be processed, like wheat or plutonium. …

Read on.

One topic that book writers and publishers don’t much like to talk about is the recent explosion of bootleg copies of popular books online. And I’m not going to talk about it either. But I am going to point to GalleyCat’s current bestseller list for pirated books, which provides a remarkably clear view of what savvy media pirates spend their time thinking about:

1. 1000 Photoshop Tips and Tricks

2. Advanced Sex: Explicit Positions for Explosive Lovemaking

3. What Did We Use Before Toilet Paper?: 200 Curious Questions

4. Photoshop CS5 All-in-One For Dummies

5. What Rich People Know & Desperately Want to Keep a Secret

6. 101 Short Cuts in Maths Any One Can Do

7. Touch Me There!: A Hands-On Guide to Your Orgasmic Hot Spots

8. How to Blow Her Mind in Bed

9. 1001 Math Problems

10. How To Make People Like You In 90 Seconds Or Less

I’m going to title my next book “The Code of Sex: Ten Secrets for Using Math to Keep Her Satisfied and Hungry for More.” I promise you that it’s going to be the most pirated book of all time.

The rapid spread of the printing press, after its invention by Gutenberg around 1450, still stands as one of history’s most remarkable examples of technological transformation. Jeremiah Dittmar, an American University professor who has been studying the economic consequences of the early diffusion of printing technology, provides a striking visual representation of the print explosion, showing how, over just 50 years, printing presses spread from a single city – Gutenberg’s Mainz – to more than 200 cities throughout Europe:

What makes the diffusion of printing so remarkable is not just that it began in the late Middle Ages, when news, ideas, and people moved exceedingly slowly (by today’s standards), but also that printing encompassed a complex system of devices and processes – not only the press itself but metallurgy, the design and casting of typographical symbols of standardized size, the creation of new oil-based inks, the expertise required to set type and work the press, and so forth – and that the inventions were very much treated as trade secrets. It seems clear that the desire for the products of the press was overwhelming.

There has, up to now, been a lot of uncertainty and controversy surrounding the economic ramifications of the printing press. Dittmar’s new paper, Information Technology and Economic Change: The Impact of the Printing Press, sheds some new light on the question. He studied the relative growth of the cities that were the sites of early presses. He found that the cities that had print shops by the end of the 15th century “grew at least 20 percentage points – and as much as 78 percentage points – more than similar cities” over the course of the next century. That suggests that “the impact of printing accounted for at least 18 and as much as 68 percent of European city growth between 1500 and 1600.” The printing press appears to have had profound economic and demographic effects as well as cultural ones.

Adam Gopnik surveys a year’s worth of books about the Internet in the new New Yorker. “A series of books explaining why books no longer matter is a paradox that Chesterton would have found implausible,” he says, and goes on from there. Like other such New Yorker surveys, reading this one feels something like taking a walk through the woods with a charming, clever, and jaded nature guide – “The squirrel is renowned as an industrious creature, but let’s not forget that it is also a flighty one” – but toward the end Gopnik makes a particularly penetrating point:

What we live in is not the age of the extended mind but the age of the inverted self. … A social network is crucially different from a social circle, since the function of a social circle is to curb our appetites and of a network to extend them. Everything once inside is outside, a click away; much that used to be outside is inside, experienced in solitude. And so the peacefulness, the serenity that we feel away from the Internet, and which all the Better-Nevers [that’s my clan!] rightly testify to, has less to do with being no longer harried by others than with being less oppressed by the force of your own inner life. Shut off your computer, and your self stops raging quite as much or quite as loud.

The idea that social networks have the effect of turning up rather than turning down the volume of our self-consciousness seems to me precisely right. The Net turns the social instinct inward, which ends up fencing in rather than freeing the self.

One of the things I try to do in The Shallows is to place the Internet into the long history of technologies that have shaped human thought – what I term “intellectual technologies.” In this clip from an interview I did recently with Big Think in New York, I discuss three of those technologies: the map, the mechanical clock, and the printed book.

Every year, Edge.org poses a question to a bunch of folks and then publishes the answers. This year’s question is (in so many words): What scientific concept would have big practical benefits if it became more broadly known? Here’s my answer:

Cognitive load

You’re sprawled on the couch in your living room, watching a new episode of Justified on the tube, when you think of something you need to do in the kitchen. You get up, take ten quick steps across the carpet, and then, just as you reach the kitchen door – poof! – you realize you’ve already forgotten what it was you got up to do. You stand befuddled for a moment, then shrug your shoulders and head back to the couch.

Such memory lapses happen so often that we don’t pay them much heed. We write them off as “absentmindedness” or, if we’re getting older, “senior moments.” But the incidents reveal a fundamental limitation of our minds: the tiny capacity of our working memory. Working memory is what brain scientists call the short-term store of information where we hold the contents of our consciousness at any given moment – all the impressions and thoughts that flow into our mind as we go through a day. In the 1950s, Princeton psychologist George Miller famously argued that our brains can hold only about seven pieces of information simultaneously. Even that figure may be too high. Some brain researchers now believe that working memory has a maximum capacity of just three or four elements.

The amount of information entering our consciousness at any instant is referred to as our cognitive load. When our cognitive load exceeds the capacity of our working memory, our intellectual abilities take a hit. Information zips into and out of our mind so quickly that we never gain a good mental grip on it. (Which is why you can’t remember what you went to the kitchen to do.) The information vanishes before we’ve had an opportunity to transfer it into our long-term memory and weave it into knowledge. We remember less, and our ability to think critically and conceptually weakens. An overloaded working memory also tends to increase our distractedness. After all, as the neuroscientist Torkel Klingberg has pointed out, “we have to remember what it is we are to concentrate on.” Lose your hold on that, and you’ll find “distractions more distracting.”

Developmental psychologists and educational researchers have long used the concept of cognitive load in designing and evaluating pedagogical techniques. When you give a student too much information too quickly, they know, comprehension degrades and learning suffers. But now that all of us – thanks to the incredible speed and volume of modern digital communication networks and gadgets – are inundated with more bits and pieces of information than ever before, everyone would benefit from having an understanding of cognitive load and how it influences memory and thinking. The more aware we are of how small and fragile our working memory is, the more we’ll be able to monitor and manage our cognitive load. We’ll become more adept at controlling the flow of the information coming at us.

There are times when you want to be awash in messages and other info-bits. The resulting sense of connectedness and stimulation can be exciting and pleasurable. But it’s important to remember that, when it comes to the way your brain works, information overload is not just a metaphor; it’s a physical state. When you’re engaged in a particularly important or complicated intellectual task, or when you simply want to savor an experience or a conversation, it’s best to turn the information faucet down to a trickle.

“The general point is this,” writes economist Tyler Cowen, the infovore’s infovore, in his 2009 book Create Your Own Economy:

When access [to information] is easy, we tend to favor the short, the sweet, and the bitty. When access is difficult, we tend to look for large-scale productions, extravaganzas, and masterpieces. Through this mechanism, costs of access influence our interior lives. There are usually both “small bits” and “large bits” of culture within our grasp. High costs of access shut out the small bits – they’re not worthwhile – and therefore shunt us toward the large bits. Low costs of access give us a diverse mix of small and large bits, but in relative terms, it is pretty easy to enjoy the small bits.

The current trend – as it has been running for decades – is that a lot of our culture is coming in shorter and smaller bits … To be sure, not everything is shorter and to the point. The same wealth that encourages brevity also enables very long performances and spectacles … There is an increasing diversity of length, but when it comes to what is culturally central, shortness is the basic trend.

I think Cowen’s analysis is essentially correct, and he’s certainly right to point out how the cost of information influences the consumption of information. (There’s also neurological evidence suggesting that, when confronted with a diversity of easily available information, our brains will prefer to sample lots of small bits of new information rather than focus for a long time on something more substantial.) If you look at the statistics of information consumption, you see considerable evidence of this decades-long trend toward ever bittier degrees of bittiness. Measures of the average length of pretty much any cultural product – magazine and newspaper articles, TV news segments and soundbites, books, personal correspondence, commercials, motion pictures – reveal a steady and often cumulatively dramatic compression in size. Studies of reading and research behavior also suggest that we are spending less time with each passing object of our attention. A survey by library sciences professor Ziming Liu, published in the Journal of Documentation, found, for example, that between 1993 and 2003 – a period characterized by a rapid shift from print reading to screen reading – people’s reading habits changed substantially, with a rapid increase in “browsing and scanning” and a falloff in “in-depth reading.”

More recently, we’ve seen a particularly dramatic compression in the average length of correspondence and other personal messages, as the production and consumption of Facebook updates, text messages, and tweets have exploded. This phenomenon, it would seem natural to assume, is further accelerating the bittiness trend.

But that’s not how the technology writer Clive Thompson sees it. As he describes in a new Wired column, he has a hunch, or at least an inkling, that the rise of Facebook and Twitter is actually increasing our appetite for longer stuff and, more surprising still, making us more contemplative. Even as we ratchet up our intake of “short takes,” he argues, we’re also increasing our intake of “long takes,” and the only thing we’re consuming less of is “middle takes.” “I think,” he writes, that “the torrent of short-form thinking is actually a catalyst for more long-form meditation.” Thompson never describes precisely how or why this catalytic action, through which the swirl of info-bits deepens our engagement with longer-form material, plays out, but it seems to involve a change in how society makes sense of events:

When something newsworthy happens today—Brett Favre losing to the Jets, news of a new iPhone, a Brazilian election runoff—you get a sudden blizzard of status updates. These are just short takes, and they’re often half-baked or gossipy and may not even be entirely true. But that’s OK; they’re not intended to be carefully constructed. Society is just chewing over what happened, forming a quick impression of What It All Means.

The long take is the opposite: It’s a deeply considered report and analysis, and it often takes weeks, months, or years to produce. It used to be that only traditional media, like magazines or documentaries or books, delivered the long take. But now, some of the most in-depth stuff I read comes from academics or businesspeople penning big blog essays, Dexter fans writing 5,000-word exegeses of the show, and nonprofits like the Pew Charitable Trusts producing exhaustively researched reports on American life.

The logic here seems murky to me. Pointing to a few examples of how some new sources of long-form writing have emerged online says nothing about trends in consumption. As Tyler Cowen suggests, it’s a fallacy to assume that the availability of long-form works means that our reading and viewing of long-form works are increasing. As Cowen points out, reducing the cost of information production has increased the diversity of the forms of information available (across the entire spectrum of length, from the micro to the jumbo), but we have gravitated to the shorter forms, not the longer ones. Even on the production side, Thompson is probably overstating the case for length by highlighting new sources of long-form writing (eg, the blogs of Dexter fans) but ignoring the whittling away of many traditional sources of long-form content (eg, popular magazines).

None of this means that Thompson’s optimistic hunch is necessarily wrong – I personally hope he’s right – but it does mean that, in the absence of real evidence supporting his case, we probably shouldn’t take his hunch as anything more than a hunch. Up to now, the evidence has pointed pretty strongly in the opposite direction, and it remains difficult for me to see how the recent explosion of micro-messages will catalyze a reversal of the long-term trend toward bittiness.

Thompson ends his column – itself a “middle take” – by pointing to the recent development of online reading tools, like Instapaper and Readability, that, by isolating digital text from the web’s cacophony of distractions, encourage deeper, more attentive reading. I agree with him that the appearance of these tools is a welcome sign. At the very least, they reveal a growing awareness that the web, in its traditional form, is deeply flawed as a reading medium, and they suggest a yearning to escape what Cory Doctorow has termed our “ecosystem of interruption technologies.” What remains to be seen is how broadly and intensively these tools will actually be used. Will they really mark a change in our habits, or will they, like home exercise machines, stand as monuments to wishful thinking? (To return to Cowen’s point, availability does not necessarily imply use.) My sense right now is that they remain peripheral technologies, particularly when compared to tools of bittiness like Facebook or texting, but it’s not impossible that they’ll become more popular.

In the course of his argument, I should note, Thompson does offer one piece of seemingly hard evidence to support his case. It concerns the length of blog posts: “One survey found that the most popular blog posts today are the longest ones, 1,600 words on average.” As it turns out, though, this “survey” – you can read it here – is pretty much worthless. It consisted of a guy asking four bloggers to list their five “most linked to” posts and then calculating the mean length of those 20 posts (1,600 words). This exercise tells us next to nothing about online reading habits, and it’s a stretch even to suggest that it shows that “the most popular blog posts today are the longest ones.” Indeed, if you look at some of the long posts highlighted in the study, they actually take the form not of “deeply considered” long takes but of cursory lists of short takes (representative title: “101 Ways to Build Link Popularity”).

What was most interesting to me about Thompson’s reference to this survey was the implication that he considers a 1,600-word article to qualify as a “long take.” Perhaps what Thompson is actually picking up on, and helping to propel forward, is a general downward trend in our expectations about the length of content. We’re shrinking our definition of long-form writing to fit the limits of our ever more distracted reading habits. What would have once been considered a remark is now considered a “short take”; what would once have been considered a “short take” is now a “middle take”; and what once would have been considered a “middle take” is now seen as a “long take.” As long as we take this path, we’ll always be able to reassure ourselves that long takes haven’t gone out of fashion.