An unfocused, confusing attempt to grapple with a complex philosophical dilemma.
An exploration of the nature of human meaning and the ways the digital age imperils it.
In 1948, Claude E. Shannon published a seminal paper, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” which not only changed the landscape of communication technology, according to Hsu, but the modern understanding of information, which now threatens human civilization. Shannon defined the bit as a fundamental unit for the encoding of information and also declared it meaningless and a devastating problem for mankind. Out of Shannon’s paper grew what the author calls “Machine Information Theory,” which is never clearly defined but seems to amount to the simultaneous aggrandizement of information (it becomes central to human activity) and diminishment (it becomes bereft of any meaning). This is problematic because humans need meaning for their survival. In fact, civilization was born out of and is made possible by written language: “This was the signal event that marked the beginning of civilization with the beginning of written language. The continuity of written symbols spanned the scale of time to provide continuity in society: civilization.” In order to rescue an understanding of information as stored meaning, Hsu argues we need a “Human Information Theory” as a counterweight to the shift inaugurated by Shannon’s work. Such a theory should devise a “single unit of information” that functions as a bearer of meaning, clarifies thorny questions about ownership of information, and can be adequately priced. Hsu’s discussion of meaning raises important and timely questions about the ways information is understood by a society that collapses the distinctions between it and wisdom, knowledge, intelligence, and data. He makes a powerful case that a sizable but misunderstood historical shift has occurred and that this miscomprehension could have disastrous societal implications. Also, the author astutely observes some of the philosophically titillating paradoxes that emerge from the modern interpretation of information. For example, in some senses, information is free, in others it’s extremely costly, and in some circumstances, when meaning is involved, it’s potentially priceless. However, Hsu’s meditation is messy and meandering, and it’s often exasperatingly unclear what point precisely the author is trying to make. Also, while Hsu argues that a Human Information Theory is urgently necessary, the author can’t confidently articulate what such a theory would amount to: “What is the Human Information Theory? To be frank, who knows?” The book concludes with more than 50 pages of paired words—for example, “eternal” versus “transitory”—and encouragement for the reader to think about them, though the objective of that exercise remains nebulous. Finally, contrary to Hsu’s suggestion, the question of meaning and its relation to language is not a new one—Plato discusses it at great length in the Cratylus, long before the digital age. He doesn’t seriously engage the inexhaustible literature on this subject, and as a result, his study is not nearly as searching as it could have been.
An unfocused, confusing attempt to grapple with a complex philosophical dilemma.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9985920-0-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: Sept. 5, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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