In our world of ingrained literacy, thinking and writing seem scarcely related activities. We can imagine the latter depending on the former, but surely not the other way around: everyone thinks, whether or not they write. But Havelock was right. The written word—the persistent word—was a prerequisite for conscious thought as we understand it. It

No sooner did Gödel’s paper appear than von Neumann was presenting it to the mathematics colloquium at Princeton. Incompleteness was real. It meant that mathematics could never be proved free of self-contradiction. And “the important point,” von Neumann said, “is that this is not a philosophical principle or a plausible intellectual attitude, but

The relationship between the telegraph and the newspaper was symbiotic. Positive feedback loops amplified the effect. Because the telegraph was an information technology, it served as an agent of its own ascendency.

It is not the amount of knowledge that makes a brain. It is not even the distribution of knowledge. It is the interconnectedness. When Wells used the word network—a word he liked very much—it retained its original, physical meaning for him, as it would for anyone in his time. He visualized threads or wires interlacing: “A network of marvellously

Thus Gödel showed that a consistent formal system must be incomplete; no complete and consistent system can exist.

Babbage invented his own machine, a great, gleaming engine of brass and pewter, comprising thousands of cranks and rotors, cogs and gearwheels, all tooled with the utmost precision. He spent his long life improving it, first in one and then in another incarnation, but all, mainly, in his mind. It never came to fruition anywhere else. It thus

Jonathan Miller rephrases McLuhan’s argument in quasi-technical terms of information: “The larger the number of senses involved, the better the chance of transmitting a reliable copy of the sender’s mental state.”

“Shannon develops a concept of information which, surprisingly enough, turns out to be an extension of the thermodynamic concept of entropy.”

The ability of a thermodynamic system to produce work depends not on the heat itself, but on the contrast between hot and cold. A hot stone plunged into cold water can generate work—for example, by creating steam that drives a turbine—but the total heat in the system (stone plus water) remains constant. Eventually, the stone and the water reach the