From The New York Times
Geoffrey Nunberg is perhaps best known for his witty commentaries on language usage and politics, gathered in the collections “Going Nucular” and “The Years of Talking Dangerously.”
But in his day job, he’s a professor of linguistics at the interdisciplinary School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley — a k a “the I School,” a name that doesn’t exactly evoke the quaint back alleys of the O.E.D. “Linguistics is actually a pretty high-tech field these days,” Nunberg said in an e-mail. “We’re the newest faculty at Berkeley, and probably the most intellectually diverse.”
On this week’s cover, Nunberg reviews “The Information,” James Gleick’s sprawling history of communications technology, from African talking drums and the first alphabets to Twitter, Wikipedia and the other things we sometimes fear are eating our collective brain.
Nunberg is skeptical of notions of “information overload,” but does admit to moments of tech-induced befuddlement. “I fancy myself a dab hand at Google, but it drives me crazy,” he said. “Information is like taxis in New York: it seems to be all over the place, and then you can never find it when you need it. But the problem isn’t just the raw volume; we’ve collapsed all these channels and categories that used to be distinct, so that nothing is where it’s supposed to be. It’s as if we’ve torn down the walls of the library, and now the reading room is full of street people.”