Poetry's role in managing the information glut

Poet and scholar Darren Wershler reviews James Gleick’s The Information, which is a layman’s history of information and information theory. Wershler begins his review by arguing that the management of information was first the task of the poet:

The problem with information is that there is always too much of it. And, as is often the case when technology is involved, the poets knew this first. In 1821, Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote in A Defence of Poetry that “we have more moral, political and historical wisdom than we know how to reduce into practice.” For Shelley, the trappings of the burgeoning information culture of the 19th century, “the accumulation of facts and calculating processes,” were the problem, not the solution. What culture needed, he argued, was “the creative faculty to imagine that which we know” and “the generous impulse to create that which we imagine.”

That ability to imagine what we know becomes harder and harder in a world where data has become a matter of quantity and not of meaning. Wershler summarizes for us the Mathematical Model of Communication, a model created during WWII with the hope of speeding up data processing:

What was – and remains – radical about the Mathematical Model of Communication is that it asserts that information is a measure of quantity, not meaning. On one hand, this degree of abstraction allowed engineers to imagine new techniques for manipulating data as systems, which helped to bring about contemporary networked society. On the other hand, the notion that information has nothing to do with meaning is a stark reminder that communication can and does take place all the time without any human input whatsoever, at speeds too fast to comprehend and scales too small to observe.