Networked

REMEMBER the Borg? The ultimate villains -- or villain -- of "Star Trek: The Next Generation," they were a species that networked so prodigiously that they became as one and went on to assimilate every individual they encountered.

Is this where human society is headed? And how bad is that? These are questions that may cross your mind while reading Alex Wright's "Glut," a penetrating and highly entertaining meditation on our information age and its historical roots. Wright argues that now is the time to take a hard look at how we have communicated with one another since coming down from the trees, because "we stand at a precipice: between the near-limitless capacity of computer networks and the real physical limits of human comprehension" -- and the way we organize knowledge determines much about how we live.

The digital age has begun to dissolve information hierarchies in favor of a democratic system of networks, embodied most obviously in the Internet. But what will such a leveling produce? Early in the book, Wright notes the prediction of Catholic mystic Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who, contemplating the advent of radio and television, "believed that this burgeoning networked consciousness signaled a new stage in God's evolutionary plan, in which human beings would coalesce into a new kind of social organism, complete with a nervous system and brain that would eventually spring to life of its own accord."

Well, that hasn't happened yet (despite the near-assimilation of millions of formerly autonomous HBO subscribers into the Soprano family), but might it? Wright attempts an answer by way of a careful examination of past information revolutions and their effects. Way past: He locates the origins of our species' ability to organize information (which he concisely defines as "the juxtaposition of data to create meaning") in the transition 2 billion years ago from unicellular life to eukaryotes, multicellular entities that incorporated "their formerly independent siblings into a kind of cellular serfdom."

After a nod to subsequent "self-directed biological hierarchies" (bird flocks, fish schools, ant colonies, beehives), Wright gets to Homo sapiens, claiming that the "similarities in human behavior among otherwise disparate cultures" suggests that we have inherited our tendency to systematize the world around us.