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    The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
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    The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
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    The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
    Ebook731 pages12 hours

    The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

    By James Gleick

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    Winner of the Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books 2012, the world's leading prize for popular science writing.

    We live in the information age. But every era of history has had its own information revolution: the invention of writing, the composition of dictionaries, the creation of the charts that made navigation possible, the discovery of the electronic signal, the cracking of the genetic code.

    In ‘The Information’ James Gleick tells the story of how human beings use, transmit and keep what they know. From African talking drums to Wikipedia, from Morse code to the ‘bit’, it is a fascinating account of the modern age’s defining idea and a brilliant exploration of how information has revolutionised our lives.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins UK
    Release dateMar 3, 2011
    ISBN9780007432523
    Unavailable
    The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
    Author

    James Gleick

    James Gleick was born in New York in 1954. He worked for ten years as an editor and reporter for The New York Times. He is the bestselling author of Chaos, Genius, Faster, What Just Happened and a biography of Isaac Newton.

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    Reviews for The Information

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    • 4/5
      De informatietheorie van Shannon vormt zowat de kern van dit boek. Shannon koppelde het begrip 'informatie' los van betekenis, zodat het gekwantificeerd kon worden zodat er plots een hele nieuwe wereld openging. Om daar te geraken, neemt Gleick ons mee langs een kronkelig pad dat loopt van tamtam over woordenboeken, de computermodellen van Babbage en Turing en de booleaanse logica. Later volgen nog de biologische informatie opgeslagen in DNA, de quantuminformatietheorie en Wikipedia. En dan heb ik niet alles vernoemd. Doorheen het hele werk is informatie nauw verbonden met communicatie. Informatie als de boodschap die overgedragen wordt van zender naar ontvanger. Die overdracht gebeurt best zo efficiënt mogelijk, met minimale inspanning en maximaal behoud van betekenis. Daarbij speelt de opkomst van de informatica - zeg maar de informatietechnologie - een essentiële rol. Dat is een duidelijk keuze. Verhelderend is dan ook wat Gleick niet behandelt in zijn boek: de opkomst van de boekdrukkunst, de encyclopedisten, het Mundaneum en alle technieken om informatie te classificeren: van UDC en DDC tot ontologiën of de ontwikkeling van een semantisch web. Informatie als opgeslagen kennis die vindbaar moet zijn, is niet wat Gleick interesseert. Gleick is een journalist. Hij beschrijft en reconstrueert en is daarbij meer geïnteresseerd in het verleden dan in de toekomst. Hij doet geen poging om vooruit te kijken en je mag van hem ook geen filosofische uitweidingen verwachten, al zetten met name de hoofdstukken over onze zelfzuchtige genen en over de quantummechanica daartoe wel aan. Immers, misschien moeten we de uitspraak 'In den beginne was het woord' wel interpreteren als 'In den beginne was er informatie'. Wat zouden daarvan niet de consequenties kunnen zijn? Gleick is een uitstekend wetenschapsjournalist, had ik hierboven eigenlijk moeten schrijven. Dat hij duidelijke keuzes maakt, kan niemand hem kwalijk nemen. Zijn boek zet aan tot nadenken en tot verder exploreren. Meer moet dat niet zijn.
    • 4/5
      This is an impressive book. It takes solid, well sourced scholarship and packages it for a general audience. What is really surprising is the very narrow definition of "The Information" used, basically the content described in Claude Shannon's Mathematical Theory of Communication, and still makes it interesting and accessible.

      For library science folks, this book is an excellent reminder of (at least) two things. First, that we had best keep data, information, knowledge, and wisdom straight in our minds as we do our work, and second that there are some very, very smart people who are working to move information out of the technologies we are used to using and if we don't keep up, we will be left behind.

      This is definitely a must read for librarians, but we should keep in mind that "The Information" is really a focused treatment of one perspective on information. It may be the most important perspective for understanding information, but it is not necessarily the same use of the term that is employed in our libraries.
    • 4/5
      This is an interesting and accessible history of the field of information theory, from its conception by Claude Shannon in the early days of telecommunication to the present day, including examinations of DNA as information and the current state of information overload.Glieck draws on a wide array of sources and fields, and makes some very dense information accessible to his reader. Reading this has definitely changed how I look at communication and information. There are a lot of concepts here that permeate daily life, or that I run into in my web engineering work and linguistics hobby reading, so I'm glad to have an understanding of the basics of information theory.
    • 4/5
      Breathtaking.
    • 5/5
      Brilliant!
    • 5/5
      A fascinating general-audience overview of the central issue of our time: information overload. More specifically, this is a history of efforts to understand information, from Early Modern dictionaries to Babbage and Lovelace in the Victorian era to the book's centerpiece: the 1940s breakthroughs in information theory by Claude Shannon. This isn't a how-to guide for managing information overload, more of a theoretical background to understand what's going on in the first era of human history where the biggest problem is not too little information but too much. But it's a readable introduction to all sorts of weighty issues (including summaries of key arguments from much more complex books, like Gödel, Escher Bach), and sprinkled with fascinating anecdotes that an inquisitive reader will eat up. Highly recommended.
    • 3/5
      The history of information science over perhaps the last 1000 years but mainly the past 100 or so. It's pretty dense in parts but I found it interesting and helps to understand our modern world where information is everywhere and available to us 24/7.
    • 5/5
      I really enjoyed this. The early chapters have a more historical focus, but the material gets more math heavy as it goes on--some of it might get a little too technical for some readers. (I do not have an extensive math background, but was able to follow it.)

      About the only small flaw is that Gleick gets so absorbed in the technical side of information science that the impact of the information flood is constrained to the last chapter and epilogue. There was more room for discussing its social and political impact.
    • 4/5
      "Whoop-de-doo. What does it all mean, Basil?" - Austin "Danger" Powers (1999)

      broad strokes with some nice connections made, but a bit haphazard for my tastes. good stuff, warrants further ponders.
    • 3/5
      According to the saying, money makes the world go round. But the thing that fuels the movement of money is information, intelligence, data, and 1s and 0s. In this volume Gleick seeks to uncover this intangible thing and bring some clarity.

      Covering all types, from the drums of Africa, the earliest forms of writing and the alphabet, the rise of the electric telegraph and telephone to the information explosion in the modern age that computers and the internet has brought. He delves into the messy world of DNA and memes, and considers the future of information given that people fell that they are drowning in it.

      Sometime written with clarity and authority, it does occasionally drag and drift away from the focus. Perhaps a case of too much information? All of that aside, he has had a fairly good stab at getting to grips with the subject. It is worth a read if you are considering it.
    • 4/5
      This is the first James Gleick book I've read. About 50% of it was over my head because my understanding of math and technology is not great. However, I collect quotes that inspire me or help me see the world in new ways. This book was a mine of those. The stories of how we have gotten to the point we are now (4G) were fascinating. I was amazed at Ada Byron and how she actually was the first to invent programming. The impact of information theory on psychology and the "soft" sciences was eye-opening as well. Maybe one day I will go back and reread it and absorb more of what it was saying. Until then, I'll ponder what I did understand.

      I think this is my favorite quote: A library is a sort of ammunition dump of unexploded arguments ready to burst forth the moment a live reader looks at a page.
    • 4/5
      A fascinating read, probably because of my eclectic interests in science, communication, analysis and having worked through computer history.
      I skip read a lot of the technical stuff but overall it held my interest. It was peppered with fasciniating tit bits of human interest and historical facts and personalities giving colour. It began with communication via african drums. One of my heros Alan Turing kept popping up. Towards the end the history of wikipedia was given a good airing.
      A comprehensive index, bibliography and extensive notes are at the back of the book. The notes didn't intrude through the naritive as some notes seem to.
    • 5/5
      Very good history of the idea of information theory.
      First couple of chapters make the whole book.
    • 5/5
      Dense, fascinating, wide-ranging, a researching tour de force. Completely revised my understanding of what information is and how it informs our time.
    • 5/5
      This is nice to read. Decent job. Shallow sometimes but wothwhile.
    • 4/5
      A good overview of a subject that's both frustratingly vague and undeniably crucial to our age. The closing, which refers to that age of ours, rang a bit odd to me, but no matter. There will be parts that'll bore you, either because they're dry by nature or because you've read about them many times before (at this point I've probably read more summaries of Gödel's incompleteness theorems than love stories), but it's all stuff that a book as broadly premised as this can't avoid.
    • 4/5
      I particularly liked the sections about Claude Shannon and Ada Lovelace.
    • 3/5
      The premise of this book is rather fascinating and the author has obviously done his research on the topic and structured it well. The material covers the whole of history of information and humanity's relationship with it. It certainly contains plenty of ideas and insights to get one thinking about larger philosophical implications of information as a concept and how it has come to shape human society.My problem with this book is partly rooted in the fact that I started off with some wealth of information about the topic already under my belt. If you have read a bit about computer science and information technology then you might find the passages on Turing and von Neumann monotonous. In addition, at some points the author went somewhat too deep into particular areas. For instance the parts on entropy, thermodynamics and quantum physics are in my opinion too far removed from the context of information theory and break up the otherwise well-paced flow of the narrative.Nevertheless the book is well written, and I would recommend it to anyone with an interest in information science who is yet to delve deeper into the topic.
    • 4/5
      well-written and comprehensive. this history of information includes people and ideas from all the appropriate scholarly fields and understands the contributions those fields made to information theory. Claude Shannon is given his proper place at the center of this new paradigm. Like the Annales school historians, Gleick focuses not so much on human events as on the commodity involved. he seeks to explain what and how the study of information itself evolved and transformed our world rather than just following a ragged timeline of historical happenings.

      this book will help you understand our modern world as virtually no other can. it is not profound or poetic but it is informative.
    • 4/5
      Interesting and entertaining look at the history of information and a few of the key people who helped birth our info-thick world.4 stars oc
    • 4/5
      A book that is its own subject, so to speak. 400 pages of information about information. Fascinating from start to finish. Mind-boggling or should I say mind-googlng? Just one of hundreds of interesting observations: "Once a piece of information is filed, it is statistically unlikely ever to be seen again by human eyes." (so the point of "saving" is ?)
    • 4/5
      Not surprisingly, the subject of James Gleick’s The Information is the field of knowledge known as “Information Theory.” The theory’s origin can be traced to a seminal article written in 1948 by Claude Shannon, an engineer employed at that time by Bell Laboratories. The article, entitled "A Mathematical Theory of Communication," appeared in two parts in the Bell System Technical Journal. Shannon focused on how to optimize the amount of information a sender wants to transmit. His theory is important because, inter alia, its use and practice greatly improves the speed and amount of content that can be transmitted or communicated electronically. As Gleick points out:"Satellite television channels, pocket music players, efficient camera and telephones and countless other modern appurtenances depend on coding algorithms to compress numbers—sequences of bits—and those algorithms trace their lineage to Shannon’s original 1948 paper.”But getting a feel for how the theory works or why it is so important isn’t easy, so Gleick takes the reader on a 180-page historical tour of various earlier forms of communication between remote sites. For example, Europeans were amazed to find that tribes of sub-Saharan Africa were able to send remarkably detailed messages to one another by means of drums. The fact that their languages were tonal (like Mandarin, but unlike any European language) facilitated their “translation” into drum sounds. In another example of comparatively long-range communication, European war fleets were able to transmit messages by way of visual flag signals, but the range of possible messages was limited to a few pre-arranged commands. By the late 18th century, the French were able to send messages long distances by way of “telegraphs.” The first devices known as telegraphs were series of signaling devices like semaphores spaced with sight of one another. Signals could be sent from one device to the next, but complicated messages were difficult to transmit because there was no known efficient method to encode the message succinctly. The invention of the electrical telegraph provided the opportunity to send signals much faster than the visual “telegraphs.” However, it was not until an efficient code like the one developed by Samuel Morse was generally put in use that the transmission of complex or just long messages became practical. Just why Morse Code was efficient is is related to a well-defined concept conventionally called the “entropy of a message” or the “Shannon entropy.” It encourages the removal of as much extraneous data as possible from a message to shorten it but without a loss of meaning. Most of you will be aware of this process even without knowing the history and theory behind it. The meaning of “I lv u” is clear, and takes less space than “I love you.” Conventions such as “twitter-speak” allow for even more economy: when someone only says “OMG” you know what that person is communicating, and six spaces have been saved.The initial thrust of Shannon’s theorizing was to condense the quantity of data to be transmitted over telephone lines, greatly enhancing the capacity of the lines to transmit ideas (content) without increasing the amount of physical assets needed to transmit. But the concept of quantifying the extraction of information from raw data soon flowed from telephone engineering into other fields such as psychology, genetics, and quantum physics. Gleick also discusses the tension between the concepts of information and meaning. Although Shannon famously said that meaning is “irrelevant to the engineering problem,” meaning remains the thing humans most want to convey or transmit in communication. The problem remains a sticky philosophical one, and Gleick does a nice job of analyzing it, although he does not solve it.Gleick is a master of elucidating daunting scientific concepts. Just like his earlier book, Chaos, The Information brings to light an intellectually challenging set of ideas and makes them understandable to the layman. (JAB)
    • 5/5
      Information overload is fittingly the topic towards the end of Gleick's great flood of information topics - language, writing, code, encyclopedias, dictionaries, computing, naming, mathematics, logic, computer science, genetics, the internet. Too much for me to take in, no less do justice to in writing.
    • 3/5
      James Gleik is a good writer and he handles this topic with some flair. From talking drums to DNA via the telegraph and morse code era he pulls together disparate information and weaves it into a coherent whole. But, while I loved much of the minutiae, and was fascinated to learn about unsung heroes such as Claude Shannon and Ada Lovelace, I thought that there some gaps that could have been filled. Maybe the concept of "bandwidth limits" is too mathematical to be easily explained, but I would have liked a little more meat. Read September 2013.
    • 4/5
      If you like the idea of relating information to thermodynamics - more specifically, the second law of entropy, you will whiz through this book in one sitting despite its length. In any transformation, a dissipation occurs. Loss in one form of energy is inevitable; in our futile attempts to avoid this loss, we inadvertently gain energy in other forms. Information can be viewed similarly. As it travels through books, mouths, films, etc it loses something each time. This loss creates room for the unintended lessons.

      I probably slaughtered the description with my futile attempts at explaining this. Suppose we can call this lesson no. 1.
    • 5/5
      Wonderful read. A nice, readable overview of information theory and its impact on modern society.
    • 5/5
      James Gleick does a remarkable job detailing the history of information and communication from the first scratchings on a cave wall to the cyberspace of today and the quantum information systems of tomorrow. He starts off not at the origin of symbolic language, but a short time after, when those ephemeral sounds between mortal humans leaped out of our minds and crystalized into timeless artifacts and immortal ideas that would forever change our culture and our world. Gleick traces the origins of both writing and mathematics to their historical beginnings and tracks the progress of these formalisms along with the theories and technologies that enabled their innovation and dissemination. He gives the reader both a clear explanation of each innovation as well as personal biographical accounts of the pioneers that made them possible. Both the breadth and the depth of the material is enlightening, and the writing is entertaining as well.
    • 4/5
      Gleick's history of humanity's growing awareness and understanding of information is detailed, interesting and possibly of use to us as we try to come to grips with our now information rich society.
    • 3/5
      The Information is a sweeping historical / scientific / technological account of information across time and disciplines. From talking drums, language, DNA, telegraphs, and bytes to Claude Shannon, Charles Babbage, Ada Byron, Samuel Morse, Alan Turing, Stephen Hawking, Richard Dawkins and John Archibald Wheeler. It’s all very fascinating although it gets more complex for a lay reader (that is, me) to understand as it goes along
    • 5/5
      We were taught that atoms and the quarks that compose them are the fundamental building blocks of nature. Gleick teaches how bits—discrete pieces of information—are a more helpful way of understanding the world.Gleick's book is ambitious. It weighs in at 426 pages with 98 subsequent pages of notes, bibliography, and index. The size of the book reflects the scope. In it, Gleick begins surveying information by considering the birth of language and ends with Wikipedia. He traces the understanding and transferring of information through all of human history!There are many fascinating insights throughout the book. Have you ever considered the task the first dictionary compiler faced in standardizing regional spelling? Did you know that Napoleon had a system of mechanical signal towers that could pass messages throughout France (at least on a clear day)? How many repeated numbers would you expect in a long random number? Did you know that Beethoven would have only heard a small amount of Bach's musical output, but we can now hear it all? Have you ever considered what effect knowing everything has on us?Gleick has written more than a history here—he reveals insight into the human condition. Take this meditation on forgetfulness:"Forgetting used to be a failing, a waste, a sign of senility. Now it takes effort. It may be as important as remembering" (407).The Information is a book from a Renaissance man who has though deeply about the human quest to relay and understand information. I found something interesting on every page.