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October 31, 2005
The Library of Babel
Borge's The Library of Babel describes a labyrinth containing a finite set of all the books ever written and all the books ever to be written. By generating all combinations of a set of alphabetic characters, the Library's contents guarantee a super set of all possible information. All predictions into the future, including a visitor's personal post mortem biography, exist somewhere in the Library.
All the useful information in the world has been generated for the library but the problem is it lacks context. The books, shelved arbitrarily, possibly by the location of the characters on their pages do not give any insight into their truth or validity. They exist as is and it is up to the reader to give them value. This arrangement is maddening to the library's visitors and employees.
The library is visited both by official censors and truth seekers. Both will fail. The censors can never truly destroy any information they deem dangerous because another, slightly different (maybe with just an extra comma), version of the same book exists somewhere else in the library. The truth seekers find the truth but they never know if it is the truth that they are looking for. There are many answers in the library but it's up to the visitor to match the answers to the questions.
Borge's essay is a timeless reflection on the value and weight of information, on the subjective perspective that defines truth. His essay could easily be applied to the current emerging medias, where everyone can publish their own book of potentially meaningless alphanumeric characters. I would also say that the essay is hopeful. There is a certain beauty to a labyrinth of true answers, indestructible and unhindered by self interested.
Posted by Bukhin, Mike at October 31, 2005 08:23 PM