The World As Information: Overload and Personal Design

  This book takes a very broad view of information, and considers it as a phenomenon in its own right, rather than the technology for handling it. It is very much concerned with the meaning of information, and what we as individuals do with it. There is a growing public interest in information as a commodity, arising from the success of the Internet and the World Wide Web and from increased awareness of problems arising from information overload. Despite this interest, there is little general understanding of how information can be structured and accessed. The World as Information tackles this by discussing the impact of information upon the individual in terms of overload and stimulation of ambition and creativity. The need to coordinate information into structured knowledge is seen as crucial: in the final chapter, the novel situation of the availability of all information, to the individual and to the overall structure of knowledge is looked at. The book is extensively referenced.

Table of Contents:
1. Introduction          [1]   Information overload is not a new problem - the plan of the book - personal reactions to the information explosion - longing, nostalgia, and the compulsion to know 2. Railway Analogies          [7] Trainspotting as an analogy of information collecting - how to respond to a world perceived as information - sacred and personal responsibility - what to put in the mind 3. The Pain of Everything          [21] Thomas Wolfe as an example of the pathology of the craving for information and experience 4. Popper's Worlds          [37] The Three Worlds model of information - what these Worlds are and how they interact 5. Dürrenmatt's Absent Lemur          [51] The physical world as information, its classification and capture - travel as a Wolfean activity - the direct experiencing of World 1 6. The Universe Within          [69] The mental realm as information - the storage capacity of the brain - the problems of accessing mental contents - information junkies and memory men - mental maps 7. World 3          [83] The extent of the information explosion and the growth of literature - the outsider personality and the desire for information - traditional ways of organizing information including library classification schemes, abstracting journals and databases - analytical approaches to information retrieval  8. From Akasha to Xanadu: Towards the World Brain          [105] World 4 - the history of the World Brain concept - encyclopaedias and knowledge synthesis - knowledge bases - hypertext and hypermedia - the World Wide Web and Nelson's Xanadu project 9. Conclusion - Some Implications for the Information Age          [129] The ecology of information - technological convergence - the availability of access to all information and the consequences of this for personal design References          [143]        Index                   [151]