Chapter 14 Summary and Analysis

Chapter 14 is called "After the Flood (A Great Album of Babel)." Gleick makes reference to a story by Jorge Luis Borges that imagines a "Library of Babel" that encompasses everything in the universe. Everything that has ever been written or uttered exists in this library and is preserved.

Gleick compares the concept with the flood of information that has washed over the world since the rise of the Internet. He describes the famous library at Alexandria, which once held writing from all over the known world but was burned when Alexandria was conquered. He sees a modern comparison to the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, which differs from previous printed encyclopedias not only in that it does not exist in physical printed form, but in that it is collaborative and descriptive, not authoritative as, for instance, the Encyclopedia Brittanica intended to be.

There...