February 26, 2010

President Barack Obama

Senator Harry Reid Majority Leader

Senator Max Baucus, Chairman, Committee on Finance Senator

Tom Harkin Chairman, Committee on Health Education Labor and Pensions

Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi Speaker of the House of Representatives Congressman

Charles Rangel Committee on Ways & Means

Congressman Henry A. Waxman Committee on Energy and Commerce

Congressman George Miller Committee on Education and Labor

The Information Master:
Jean-Baptiste Colbert's Secret State Intelligence System

By Jacob Soll

(University of Michigan Press,
277 pp., $65)

That resonant piece of verbal shorthand, TMI--or Too Much Information--would make a fine epigraph for our age. Anyone with an Internet connection today has access to exponentially greater quantities of writing, images, sound, and video than anyone on earth could have imagined just twenty years ago. Small wonder that we have become obsessed with the idea of "information" as an abstract substance independent of its content--something that we accumulate, measure, and "process," rather than ponder and understand. And small wonder that the management and control of information, whether by its "producers," by governments, or by corporations such as Google, has emerged as an increasingly important political concern, and as a subject of scholarship.