Historical adaptations to information overload: theoretical models and technological developments

¶ … Retrieval & Storage

It has become a commonplace in public discussion over the past decade or two to assert that we are presently living through an informational revolution as great and momentous as that which took place in the wake of Gutenberg's movable type and the introduction of printed books to Europe. Whether this proves to be accurate or merely a rarefied and academic strain of vacuous Silicon Valley hype has yet to be demonstrated, but it is undeniable that technological changes have altered the way in which information can be stored and retrieved. What has not changed is the tendentious nature whereby information in general is stored and retrieved. I wish to focus on three ways in which this tendentiousness has been expressed in the past -- which I will summarize as forgery, ideology, and historiography -- in which the storage and retrieval of information has conditioned the use and interpretation of the historical record.

Forgery is the first, and most obvious, way whereby information can "interpret" the historical record, by seeming to falsify it. Yet it is crucial to recognize that forgery itself is not interchangeable with falsification. M.T. Clanchy's account in From Memory to Written Record of the manuscript tradition of the middle ages is particularly useful on this topic. Clanchy offers an account (somewhat flavored by Walter Ong) of a society in which orality still has authority. In the time period Clanchy examines, a monarch making a gift to a religious institution might not necessarily do so in writing. Thus what we might term a "forgery" might actually be necessary in order to maintain something that is genuine, and forgery becomes (by our standards) an inauthentically produced written document of an authentic orally-dictated reality. As Clanchy describes it, "writing, or the lack of it, should not be allowed to annul or invalidate previous pious gifts. From this point-of-view 'forgery' is an inappropriate term to apply to renewals of evidence which were intended to ensure that a monastic house was adequately provided with charters to defend its patrons and saints against rivals" (322). This leads Clanchy to insist, usefully, that the concept of forgery should not be seen as marginal but in fact closer to the authentic center of textual production: "forgers re-created the past in an acceptable literate form. They are best understood not as occasional deviants on the peripheries of legal practice, but experts entrenched at the centre of literary and intellectual culture…" (319). To a certain extent, however, this reflects a society in which the storage of information in writing does not permit mass production in the way that print does. Even in circumstances where the mass production of manuscript documents was necessitated, Clancy notes that "often documents were produced in duplicate or triplicate for greater security, and occasionally alternative texts seem to have been prepared by the beneficiary, probably in the hope that the seal would be affixed to the more advantageous one. " (321). The question, then, of which version is to be preferred seems almost accidental. The historical "truth" in this instance would be entirely dependent on which document a monarch or other figure of authority chose to affix his seal to. We are not even in the position of knowing whether the bearer of the seal was necessarily literate.

To describe alteration of the historical record, or of the stored information that constitutes it, as ideological is, of course, a commonplace. But it is worth noting that such ideology can occasionally be a two-edged sword, that preserves as much as it destroys. Chartier's description of the attempts at completeness in library cataloguing very frequently betrayed an ideology that nevertheless did not entirely efface the historical record -- he relates that "the attempt to be complete that led Du Verdier to mention Lutheran and Calvinist authors who wrote in French led to another aim: to make sure that 'Catholics are warned which books are reproved and censured so that they will flee them'." (87). Chartier is of course describing the history of printed matter in post-Reformation Europe, but it is worth noting that this double-edged process can be seen earlier -- and for precisely similar reasons -- in the historical period that predates printed books. Until the unlikely rediscovery of the Nag Hammadi texts in the twentieth century, the most detailed information about Gnostic beliefs and practices came not from Gnostic sources but from their orthodox foes like Irenaeus, who unwittingly played the same sort of role that Du Verdier played in cataloguing texts to which he was religiously opposed. This plays out even in the contemporary world, when religious authority unwittingly publicizes works by condemning them. (It is unlikely most fundamentalist Shi'ites would have heard of Salman Rushdie were he not subjected to clerical fatwa.) We can see, then, that ideology may occupy the same equivocal role as forgery in the transmission of historical information.

Of course historiography itself has been frequently critiqued as an ideological enterprise, even when it sees itself as disinterested. To some extent, then, we may understand historiography as occupying the same equivocal role as both forgery and ideology in the storage of information. Simpson's account of the early modern historiographical efforts of Bale and Leland demonstrate this amply. In Simpson's words, Bale and Leland "paint a chiaroscuro picture of ages, in which they see themselves as writing on the boundary of one, positive, epoch, about another, negative, period ending in the immediate past. Both writers seek to highlight the brilliance of their own age, and to contrast that with the darkness of the past" (Simpson 11). Both of these writers are, by Simpson's own account, chiefly engaged in ideological pursuit, far more doggedly than a contemporary historiographer would be: Leland "writes…without much characteristically Protestant flavour, and is primarily concerned with secular history in the service of royal power. Bale, by contrast, wishes to shape a Protestant historiography, in which English history conforms to and fulfils scriptural revelation" (Simpson 20). But what is most interesting about Simpson's account of Bale and Leland is that the obvious ideological motivations in their historiography have resulted in a set of idees recues that persist to this day, a sort of fossilized ideological motivation in our own "standard terminology of modern cultural history, of a Middle Age and a Renaissance," as Simpson puts it (26). Indeed Simpson states this openly later in his account, noting that "Middle English and Renaissance or early modern studies still operate within disablingly strict periodic divisions, according to which the 'medieval period' continues to figure all that is other to modernity" (Simpson 32).