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1-Page Summary of The Information

Overview

What is information? Is it physical or intangible? Can it be a form of language that communicates with others?

Information is anything conveyed by a particular arrangement of things. As you’ll see in this pack, information can be language, genetics or technologies. Information has had an enormous impact on human thought and history because it led to logic. So information changed the way we think and therefore its history is an indirect history of human thought. You’ll learn about the major developments and changes in how humans use information in our twenty-first century lives.

When you’re finished reading this passage, you’ll learn how Morse code changed the way we think about time; why it’s impossible to make a comprehensive dictionary (including all words); and what “memes” tell us about information transfer.

Big Idea #1: Humans have been communicating information to each other from the beginning, and in the most unlikely of ways.

Information is a difficult term to define. It can be defined as facts that we know, but it can also mean more than that. For example, information can include things such as objects and symbols that convey meaning.

Information has been used to measure and compare things in the past. For example, we can weigh a pot of water against rocks to see which is heavier. However, people were originally interested in information because it helped them communicate with each other better.

All kinds of things can be used to convey information, such as letters that carry words and drum beats that carry meaning.

Drumming is a form of communication that has been around for centuries. There are records of people using drums to communicate with each other throughout Africa, as early as 1730. One example was Francis Moore, who noted how drummers would signal the arrival of an enemy by beating their drums but also suspected they were used to call on nearby villages for help.

It has been almost 200 years since a missionary named John F. Carrington tried to understand and explain the “talking drums” of Africa in 1914.

A man named Hugh Tracey went to Africa and discovered that the drums were not only used for signaling danger, but also for talking. The people talked about all sorts of things through their drums. They told stories and even jokes using different pitches in a way similar to how African languages work.

Big Idea #2: Writing was not only important for communication – it changed the way we think.

The internet has revolutionized our lives. Now imagine how much life would have changed when writing was first introduced. The introduction of written language had a tremendous effect on society and culture, just like the internet does today.

Writing has preserved the spoken word and changed how we appreciate it.

According to anthropologists, people were already writing in the Stone Age (30,000 years ago).

Since the beginning of human history, people have been making marks on cave walls and rocks. These were not writing in the sense that we understand it today, but they did represent ideas and thoughts. People also used pictures to express their ideas before writing words down. The first kind of writing was pictographic (writing a picture), then ideographic (writing an idea) and finally logographic (writing a word). All these forms eventually combined to create alphabets, which are made up of individual sounds.

The invention of a system that conveys ideas changes the way we think. It makes it easier for us to communicate and reason logically.

Logic doesn’t exist without language. It wouldn’t be possible to have logic if it weren’t for written words that are easy to compare with each other. For example, a syllogism is a logical argument in which the conclusion is derived from two premises. One of those premises might say “all Simpsons are yellow” and another one could say “Homer is a Simpson.” The conclusion would then state that Homer must be yellow because he’s part of the Simpson family. Sure, you can speak out syllogisms, but their existence relies on writing so people can easily see what has been said and compare it with the rest of text.