The
Digital Library of Babel
In The Library
of Babel by Jorge Luis Borges, the narrator
describes a vast, indefinitely repeating library
whose books contain every possible variation of 25
orthographic symbols (the period, comma, space, and
22 letters of the alphabet). Because the Library
contains all possible books, the likelihood of
finding a book that is coherent, much less one that
contains the information you need, is next to nothing,
and the Library is practically useless as an
information source despite containing all information.
While no medium of information has ever come close to
containing the amount of information available in the
Library of Babel, the collective amount of
information available to the general public through
mediums such as the Internet is still quite extensive
and constantly growing. And there is the threat that
as the Internet keeps growing it will become more and
more like the Library of Babel; useless in its
immensity.
For many people of my
generation and the next, the Internet has almost
completely replaced the library as a nexus of
information and ideas. The information on the
Internet covers a large variety of human subjects in
nearly all popular languages and dialects; in fact,
there are even several dialects originating from
Internet culture itself. The amount of information on
the Internet is extremely vast and constantly growing;
A study by the Internet security company Cyveillance
estimates that as of the year 2000 there were
approximately 2.1 billion unique pages on the
Internet, growing at a rate of 7.3 million per day (Murray).
This is an impressive figure, but still infinitesimal
when compared with the size of the Library of Babel.
To fully understand
just how much larger the Library is one needs to
ascertain how many books the Library must contain in
order to be considered Total. To find how many books
the Library of Babel must contain, multiply the
number of pages (410), lines (40), and positions per
line (80) to get the total possible positions in any
book, and then multiply the 25 possible orthographic
symbols by themselves for each possible position. You
will come up with a staggering 25^1,320,000 books (25
multiplied by itself 1,320,000 times); compared to
this number the 2 billion pages of the Internet are
infinitesimal. Even at the estimated growth rate of 7.3
million pages per day, clearly it will take an
extremely long time for the Internet to even come
close to the unfathomably vast Library.
Some of the
information available on the Internet resembles the
information contained in the Library of Babel,
specifically, the wide array of contradictory
information on particular topics as well as nearly
identical information. Given any particularly
controversial subject (abortion for example) you will
find on many individuals’ personal websites,
especially those who are politically active,
arguments in support of it, arguments against
supporting it, refutations of the arguments in
support, refutations of the arguments against,
refutations of the refutations of either, and so on.
This is very similar to the narrator’s
description of some of the books that could be found
in the Library, "…the faithful catalogue of
the Library, thousands and thousands of false
catalogues, a demonstration of the fallacy of these
catalogues, a demonstration of the fallacy of the
true catalogue…" (Borges 61) Also, just as
"there are always several hundreds of thousands
of imperfect facsimiles" (Borges 63) in the
Library, there are hundreds of thousands of copies of
the same information available on the Internet on
what are called mirrors. Mirror sites on the Internet
are usually either archival websites which back-up
information of the past, or websites that cite other
websites as sources and contain parts of that
information. Sometimes mirror sites differ only in
how they are displayed, much like the hundreds of
thousands of "works which differ only by one
letter or one comma" (Ibid) described by
the narrator in The Library of Babel.
The Internet resembles
the Library of Babel not only in its contents, but
also, for lack of a better term, in its shape.
According to the narrator, "The Library is a
sphere whose consummate centre is any hexagon, and
whose circumference is inaccessible." (Borges
59) By sphere he cannot mean the literal geometrical
shape (which would be impossible to create out of any
number of hexagonal shapes), instead it indicates how
one could travel in any direction for an unfathomably
long amount of time and never reach the end of the
Library. This also explains how there can be no
absolute center point, because one can only define a
center if there are boundaries on all sides, but
since the circumference is inaccessible any point can
be said to be the relative center of everything
around it. The Internet shares many of these traits.
It is not a sphere of course, but it is also no other
geometrical shape. It is impossible to visualize
because the Internet does not exist in any particular
physical space. The Internet is the data on the
servers as much as it is the connections made by the
cables that connect the users to the servers as much
as it is the information on the users’ computers
itself. The visual hallucination of the Internet,
which is the series of graphical user interfaces that
allows one to navigate through the information on the
Internet, is called ‘cyberspace’ because
its physical presence is no more tangible than the
electrons chaotically moving in my brain that compose
my every thought. Though the Internet must
necessarily occupy a finite amount of space it also
has no discernable boundaries. No matter how long you
click on hyperlinks you will never reach the "end"
of the Internet (though there are certainly websites
which claim to be the "last" page of the
Internet), and so like the Library of Babel the
Internet has no boundaries and thus no center.
An important
difference between the Internet and the Library of
Babel is that the users of the Internet created its
content, whereas the librarians did not create the
books of the Library. This causes there to be a
drastic difference between the utility of the
information on the Internet and the utility of the
information in the Library. For starters, the vast
majority of the information on the Internet is
written in English, the most common language in the
world, whereas the books of the Library can be in any
possible language, or no language at all, and so it
is far more likely that, if it is in any language at
all, it will be in a language that the librarians do
not know how to read or translate than the few
languages they might be versed in. Also, while the
books of the Library do not seem to be ordered in any
kind of discernable way, the users of the Internet
order the information they create into categories or
websites on particular topics so that others can look
through only the information which they might be
interested in.
Despite the
differences between the Internet and the Library of
Babel, some worry that with the exponential growth of
the Internet there will be an information overload
and it will become much like the Library of Babel,
useless in its immensity. The Library of Babel,
for them, becomes a warning about the dangers of too
much information flooding the Internet and making it
useless. The French journalist Ignacio Ramonet
discussed this exact subject in a 1999 interview with
the French newspaper Libération entitled
"Sur l’Internet" (On the Internet),
referring specifically to The Library of Babel:
(translated from French)
There is ... the
excess of information, which confronts all
Internet users with their own ignorance as they
try to find their way through an ocean of
information which tends to be difficult to
organize or verify; this is the syndrome of the
Library of Babel as imagined by Jorge Luis Borges,
which contains all the books ever written or to
be written [in every language and every script]…Just
as in that Library of Babel, vast amounts of
information are there on the Net, with all their
variants and approximations; nothing guarantees
the reliability of the data; rumor and fact
become as one. (Ramonet)
Ramonet seems to
forget that as the information on the Internet has
been created and organized by the users themselves it
is significantly different from the information in
the Library of Babel. Nevertheless he does make a
good point: as more and more information becomes
available on the Internet it necessarily becomes
harder to organize and verify due to its sheer size.
And certainly as the information becomes less
organized it will become more difficult to find what
you are looking for; making the Internet less useful
and more like the Library of Babel. In a 1995 volume
of the British science-fiction magazine Interzone,
David Langford explored this concept in a fictional
sequel to The Library of Babel entitled The
Net of Babel in which the Library of Babel is
digitized and the librarians experience the futility
of trying to find any useful information in it, in
much the same way as they experienced the futility of
physically searching for useful books in the original
story (Langford).
Of course, we must
always keep in mind that in 1941, when Borges first
published The Library of Babel, the Internet
as a concept of instantaneous worldwide communication
would have been inconceivable. Nevertheless, it is
not inconceivable to think that Borges may have been
aware of the exponential growth of information as new
technologies such as the television enabled us to
become more and more connected to the rest of the
world. It is more likely then that The Library of
Babel is a warning about the dangers of
information overload in general. Perhaps it is even a
commentary on the nature of information itself and
how it is only useful to us so long as it is limited.
In any case, the Internet is undoubtedly the largest
collection of information ever assembled and so it
best resembles the total sum of human information
thus far. Therefore if we are to accept Borges’
warning in The Library of Babel we should be
focusing our efforts to avoid creating a Library of
Babel on the Internet.