and should try to work together. Around the world, I can see it starting to happen: as usual, the further from headquarters, the more there’s real teamwork. Orrin Klapp’s writings on the gap between information and meaning, and the risks of social entropy from banality and noise, could hardly be more relevant to the Digital Revolution – despite being written before a single PC had hit the shelves. Cacophony The unwanted child of fragmentation is cacophony. Noise, noise, everywhere. A few years ago I came across the writings of the now-forgotten Canadian sociologist Orrin Klapp, from the University at Western Ontario. They even smell slightly musty, as mine is a second-hand copy, but deserve to be displayed in neon now, because Klapp saw, with a clarity that still is scarce, exactly what would happen. Computers can speed the process of data, but give us little help in reading the meaning of the printout. Meaning has a reputation for arriving late – indeed the highest meaning, wisdom, is also slowest to arrive…. So society suffers a meaning gap, between input of factual information and the construction of common meaning. The paradox of the meaning gap generated by information overload is that ever more facts pile up, the credibility of which is unquestioned, but the overall meaning of the system is lacking and its rhetoric is