Information Overload, Paradigm Underload? The Internet and Political Disruption Ben O’Loughlin Royal Holloway, University of London The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood by James Gleick. London: Fourth Estate, 2011. 544 pp., £25.00 hardcover, 978 0 00 722573 6 The Net Delusion: How Not to Liberate the World by Evgeny Morozov. London: Allen Lane, 2011. 432 pp., £16.99 paperback, 978 0 14 196182 8 Cognitive Surplus Creativity and Generosity in a Con- nected Age by Clay Shirky. London: Allen Lane, 2010. 256 pp., £20.00 hardcover, 978 1 84 614217 8 The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires by Tim Wu. London: Atlantic Books, 2010. 384 pp., £19.99 hardcover, 978 1 84887 984 3 By early 2011 many powerful political institutions appeared to face a profound challenge. Wikileaks, Anon- ymous and the Arab Spring seemed part of a trend. Ordinary people around the world were using new com- munications media to mobilise for change and in some cases get results. The Internet – the overlapping network of networks – enabled an information flux that authori- ties could not control. This was not a matter of scale, or direction, or ownership of information. This, for some, was a phase shift to a qualitatively new form of human relations. The meaning of power, authority and indeed ownership seemed increasingly muddy. This created two problems. First, how could these shifts be understood? Second, how could a qualitatively different world be acted upon, by policy makers, activists and others? The struggle for comprehension was evident when James Gleick, author of The Information reviewed here, came to talk at the Royal Society of Arts in London in April. Mod- erator Nico McDonald asked whether the rapidly chang- ing scales, velocities and characteristics of information were creating ‘information overload, paradigm under- load’. Without a paradigm to understand the present, how can policy be made for the future? This is a pointed problem because we cannot stop making decisions, take a sabbatical and figure it all out. Policy makers, with guidance from IT companies and the defence industry, are pressing ahead with new tools, programmes and infrastructures, even if it is unclear what will work. Scholars of politics and society seem left behind or left out (with one exception: Philip N. Howard’s The Digital Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy). In this paradigm vacuum, it is significant that none of the books reviewed here are by political scientists. All four are worth reading for their provocations to the general reader as well as to policy makers. Gleick and Tim Wu each offer historical accounts up to the present that put the challenges faced today into context. Gleick tells of how information has been structured through human history, Wu of how information indus- tries have been organised through US history. The History of Gleick’s subtitle is a 5,000-year trajectory of human inscription, calculation and utilisation of information. This story of technological and conceptual advances is also one of social anxieties and exhilarations and commercial possibilities. Gleick’s account ranges from communica- tion by tribal drums, the creation of calculating machines and theorems by modern schemers like Charles Babbage, Alan Turing and Kurt Gödel and, finally, The Flood we face today: the information overload stemming in part from the quantification of life, communication and matter enabled by The Theory. The Theory refers to Claude Shannon, whose 1948 paper ‘The Mathematical Theory of Communication’ led to information theory. For Shannon we can know how communication works if we reduce it to the transmission of information. If communi- cation is mathematical then ‘meaning is irrelevant’ – its cultural complexities irreducible to modelling. Shannon’s theory has helped illuminate a range of fields. Biology becomes the study of how information is encoded as instructions in DNA; in physics the treatment of matter (‘its’) as information (‘bits’) helps explain quantum mechanics; psychology, philosophy, management are all transformed too. The theory has underpinned the emer- gence of the Internet and the world of always-on digital life that people and institutions must navigate today. Telling human history as a passage of ever more intense and expanded information makes it seem as if we were always going to end up with The Flood; it is a Global Policy Volume 2 . Issue 3 . October 2011 Global Policy (2011) 2:3 doi: 10.1111/j.1758-5899.2011.00137.x ª 2011 London School of Economics and Political Science and John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Review Essay 349