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The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood, by James Gleick
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James Gleick, the author of the best sellers Chaos and Genius, now brings us a work just as astonishing and masterly: a revelatory chronicle and meditation that shows how information has become the modern era’s defining quality—the blood, the fuel, the vital principle of our world.
The story of information begins in a time profoundly unlike our own, when every thought and utterance vanishes as soon as it is born. From the invention of scripts and alphabets to the long-misunderstood talking drums of Africa, Gleick tells the story of information technologies that changed the very nature of human consciousness. He provides portraits of the key figures contributing to the inexorable development of our modern understanding of information: Charles Babbage, the idiosyncratic inventor of the first great mechanical computer; Ada Byron, the brilliant and doomed daughter of the poet, who became the first true programmer; pivotal figures like Samuel Morse and Alan Turing; and Claude Shannon, the creator of information theory itself.
And then the information age arrives. Citizens of this world become experts willy-nilly: aficionados of bits and bytes. And we sometimes feel we are drowning, swept by a deluge of signs and signals, news and images, blogs and tweets. The Information is the story of how we got here and where we are heading.
- Sales Rank: #121172 in Books
- Published on: 2011-03-01
- Released on: 2011-03-01
- Format: Deckle Edge
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.66" h x 1.85" w x 6.74" l, 2.22 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 544 pages
- From theory to the flood
Amazon.com Review
Amazon Best Books of the Month, March 2011: In a sense, The Information is a book about everything, from words themselves to talking drums, writing and lexicography, early attempts at an analytical engine, the telegraph and telephone, ENIAC, and the ubiquitous computers that followed. But that's just the "History." The "Theory" focuses on such 20th-century notables as Claude Shannon, Norbert Wiener, Alan Turing, and others who worked on coding, decoding, and re-coding both the meaning and the myriad messages transmitted via the media of their times. In the "Flood," Gleick explains genetics as biology's mechanism for informational exchange--Is a chicken just an egg's way of making another egg?--and discusses self-replicating memes (ideas as different as earworms and racism) as information's own evolving meta-life forms. Along the way, readers learn about music and quantum mechanics, why forgetting takes work, the meaning of an "interesting number," and why "[t]he bit is the ultimate unsplittable particle." What results is a visceral sense of information's contemporary precedence as a way of understanding the world, a physical/symbolic palimpsest of self-propelled exchange, the universe itself as the ultimate analytical engine. If Borges's "Library of Babel" is literature's iconic cautionary tale about the extreme of informational overload, Gleick sees the opposite, the world as an endlessly unfolding opportunity in which "creatures of the information" may just recognize themselves. --Jason Kirk
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. In 1948, Bell Laboratories announced the invention of the electronic semiconductor and its revolutionary ability to do anything a vacuum tube could do but more efficiently. While the revolution in communications was taking these steps, Bell Labs scientist Claude Shannon helped to write a monograph for them, A Mathematical Theory of Communication, in which he coined the word bit to name a fundamental unit of computer information. As bestselling author Gleick (Chaos) astutely argues, Shannon's neologism profoundly changed our view of the world; his brilliant work introduced us to the notion that a tiny piece of hardware could transmit messages that contained meaning and that a physical unit, a bit, could measure a quality as elusive as information. Shannon's story is only one of many in this sprawling history of information. With his brilliant ability to synthesize mounds of details and to tell rich stories, Gleick leads us on a journey from one form of communicating information to another, beginning with African tribes' use of drums and including along the way scientists like Samuel B. Morse, who invented the telegraph; Norbert Wiener, who developed cybernetics; and Ada Byron, the great Romantic poet's daughter, who collaborated with Charles Babbage in developing the first mechanical computer. Gleick's exceptional history of culture concludes that information is indeed the blood, the fuel, and the vital principle on which our world runs. (Apr.)
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From Booklist
*Starred Review* Acutely sensitive to the human drama involved in pioneering thought and discovery, best-selling science and technology writer Gleick has developed an epic sense of humankind�s quest for mastery of information, �the vital principle.� In this tour de force, the first book to fully chronicle the story of information and how it has transformed human thought and life, Gleick follows the path from the ingenious codes used by African drummers to the invention of the alphabet and writing, which made possible deep analysis and logic, the bedrock for information theory. As Gleick elucidates the roles cryptography, libraries, quantum physics, and molecular biology play in information science and tracks the cresting waves that rapidly delivered the telegraph, telephone, radio, television, computer, and Internet, he vividly profiles a compelling cast of geniuses. There�s prescient Charles Babbage and witty, surpassingly gifted Ada Byron King, logic master George Boole, and the too-little-known Claude Shannon, whose �elegant solutions� include designating the �bit� as �the smallest possibly quantity of information.� Gleick is equally illuminating in his explications of such forces key to information as uncertainty, entropy, memes, and randomness. This is intellectual history of tremendous verve, insight, and significance. Unfailingly spirited, often poetic, Gleick recharges our astonishment over the complexity and resonance of the digital sphere and ponders our hunger for connectedness. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Destined to be a science classic, best-seller Gleick�s dynamic history of information will be one of the biggest nonfiction books of the year. --Donna Seaman
Most helpful customer reviews
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful.
If you work in computers/software/information sciences, this should be a must-read
By Kim Crosser
As someone who has been in computers and information sciences since 1970, this was an amazing and entertaining book.
I knew a lot of the history, having lived some of it, but a lot of this was new to me.
Very well-researched and presented in a clear and highly readable style. This volume clearly covers the concepts and development of theories of information. It covers both theory and practice and whether you are a beginning computer programmer or an information science theorist, you should find something in here that you didn't know and that will awaken you to some new ideas.
If you like this volume, try "Godel, Escher, Bach" by Douglas Hofstadter. That is an eclectic and entertaining mix of mathematics, art, and music philosophy, tying together apparently dissimilar disciplines into a mind-bending tour-de-force.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
is information without meaning ,meaningful?
By Victor V. C. Patton
As a history the book is superb. It documents the flood of data in a quantifiable manner. As a theory it vacillates between information without meaning and information with meaning. This problem was created when Shannon's paper on communication theory was referred to as information theory. This confusion is avoided if it is clearly understood that Shannon's work applies only to the symbol patterns in a communication channel. The encoding table, created by human intellect, creates the pattern carried by the symbols. Shanon enters at this point and puts a scientific and engineering foundation under the design of the communication channel which moves the code pattern from sender to receiver. in my opinion there is no information in this pattern until it is processed by the receivers decode table. This may be in the form of a symbol driven machine where the decode table is designed into the machine by the intellect of the engineers doing the design or if the symbolic pattern is to be decoded by a human being, then typically the decode table converts the pattern to the launguage of the receiver. Reliable communication occurs perfectly only if the sender and the receiver have exacly the same definition for each and every word. The book would have been easier to follow if the assignment of meaning,for which there is no physics, was carefully seperated from the transfer of symbols in a communication channel for which there is physics and engineering principles which Claude Shannon masterfully docummented. This reality is lost because of the familuarity and confidence we each have in the use of the language we were raised with.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
only one thing wrong...
By Kindle Customer
This book was hard to get through but only because there was so many incredibly important ideas. I read this months ago and I am still thinking about it. The part I disliked? That there was almost no actual communications research presented. All (or all but a tiny bit) came from engineering or computer science. University communications departments have ceded the entirety of modern communications theory and practice to others. And the worst part is that they don't even care or seem aware of that fact. So... my review of the book? Read it. It is fascinating and one of the most important books to read if you want to get a good, basic overview of the ideas that will shape the next 50 years or more. If you are affiliated with any university department of communications you should be ashamed for a bit and then start fixing the last 50 years of irrelevancy this book clearly has exposed.
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