Geoff Nunberg's guest appearances

Geoff Nunberg

Bullseye with Jesse Thorn

UC Berkeley School of Information

KPCC News

Continuing Studies Public Lectures

Eric Goldman

Scott Young

David Clark

Robert Frost

Chris Anderson

Pete Seeger

Mitch Kapor

Tina Seelig

Dylan Thomas

Denise Levertov

danah boyd

Jimmy Wales

Eudora Welty

Craig Newmark

John Grant

OwlTail

It accumulates on our hard drives and lurks in our genes. Companies and consultants promise to refine it out of data or distill it into knowledge. It can topple churches and tyrants; the health of democratic societies depends on its free exchange (and free, we're told, is exactly what it wants to be). Its revolution has upended our lives: now we do its work, suffer its fatigue from its explosion, and worry about its widening gap, as we take up our roles in its society, its economy, and its age — not to mention (in a more transitory and purely local way) its school.So what could it — or not to beg the question, what could they — possibly be? Does "information" name a single concept or a family of concepts? Or is it not really a concept at all, but just a bit of semantic sleight of hand? For starters, it helps to look at how we got here. It turns out that confusion of the meanings of "information" began at least two centuries ago (and as it happens, dictionaries all get the story wrong). "Information" has always been a jerry-built notion that conceals its own inconsistencies, so that it can slip surreptitiously between one sense and another. But ultimately, I'll suggest, that's exactly what has made the term so adaptable and so useful to us: the words we name our ages after are always ones that enable us to leave important things unsaid.

It accumulates on our hard drives and lurks in our genes. Companies and consultants promise to refine it out of data or distill it into knowledge. It can topple churches and tyrants; the health of democratic societies depends on its free exchange (and free, we're told, is exactly what it wants to be). Its revolution has upended our lives: now we do its work, suffer its fatigue from its explosion, and worry about its widening gap, as we take up our roles in its society, its economy, and its age — not to mention (in a more transitory and purely local way) its school.<br><br>So what could it — or not to beg the question, what could they — possibly be? Does "information" name a single concept or a family of concepts? Or is it not really a concept at all, but just a bit of semantic sleight of hand? For starters, it helps to look at how we got here. It turns out that confusion of the meanings of "information" began at least two centuries ago (and as it happens, dictionaries all get the story wrong). "Information" has always been a jerry-built notion that conceals its own inconsistencies, so that it can slip surreptitiously between one sense and another. But ultimately, I'll suggest, that's exactly what has made the term so adaptable and so useful to us: the words we name our ages after are always ones that enable us to leave important things unsaid.

A (very) brief history of "information"; or, what are we all doing here, anyway? (Geoff Nunberg)

Left and right may disagree as to which expressions count as deceptive packaging and which are merely effective branding, but both acknowledge that the American public is particularly suscept to linguistic manipulation.

An Evening with Geoff Nunberg: The Paradox of Political Language

Mimi Ito

Brewster Kahle

Brad Horowitz

Explore the Future of Information with Geoffrey Nunberg and panelists Mimi Ito, Brewster Kahle, and Bradley Horowitz. For more information about this event please contact kristi@ischool.berkeley.edu.

The Future of Information Panel (Geoff Nunberg, Mimi Ito, Brewster Kahle, Brad Horowitz)