Formerly all time was local: when the sun was highest, that was noon. Only a visionary (or an astronomer) would know that people in a different place lived by a different clock. Now time could be either local or standard, and the distinction baffled most people. The railroads required standard time, and the telegraph made it feasible.

A cleaner formulation of Epimenides’ paradox—cleaner because one need not worry about Cretans and their attributes—is the liar’s paradox: This statement is false. The statement cannot be true, because then it is false. It cannot be false, because then it becomes true. It is neither true nor false, or it is both at once.

For McLuhan this was prerequisite to the creation of global consciousness—global knowing. “Today,” he wrote, “we have extended our central nervous systems in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned. Rapidly, we approach the final phase of the extensions of man—the technological simulation of consciousness,

Redundancy—inefficient by definition—serves as the antidote to confusion. It provides second chances. Every natural language has redundancy built in;

Undaunted, newspapers could not wait to put the technology to work. Editors found that any dispatch seemed more urgent and thrilling with the label “Communicated by Electric Telegraph.” Despite the expense—at first, typically, fifty cents for ten words—the newspapers became the telegraph services’ most enthusiastic patrons.

Wiener was as worldly as Shannon was reticent. He was well traveled and polyglot, ambitious and socially aware; he took science personally and passionately. His expression of the second law of thermodynamics, for example, was a cry of the heart: We are swimming upstream against a great torrent of disorganization, which tends to reduce everything to

The key was control, or self-regulation. To analyze it properly he borrowed an obscure term from electrical engineering: “feed-back,” the return of energy from a circuit’s output back to its input. When feedback is positive, as when the sound from loudspeakers is re-amplified through a microphone, it grows wildly out of control. But when feedback

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.”