The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

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The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

3.93 of 5 stars 3.93 · rating details · 5,086 ratings · 695 reviews

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

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Published (first published January 1st 2011)

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Oct 15, 2012 Laura rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2012, kindle, library-school-books

I now LOATHE this book.

I had started reading it last spring before I left Nashville. I was trying to be a good library minion and keep up to date with reading in my field. I got through chapter 7 (1/3 of the book) and decided it was a bit heavy and that I would have enough reading of that sort soon enough in graduate school.

So guess what I had to read for my Perspectives in Information class?

If I thought this book was difficult before....I HAD NO IDEA.

The difficulty lies not in the actual cont...more

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Dec 04, 2012 Madame X rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction, favorites

I loved this book so much. It was everything I could have hoped, and that's saying something. However, it's hard to transform gushing praise into a useful review, even harder since in this case I listened to the audiobook & I find it pretty difficult marshall my thoughts about audiobooks into a useful order.

What I will say is that the title is pretty startlingly accurate. A history (which, I cannot stress enough, so fascinating -- the chapter on dictionaries alone made me want to jump up and...more

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Mar 11, 2011 Richard marked it as to-read · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction, history

(Gushing review at the New York Times: Drumbeat to E-Mail: The Medium and the Message. At SFPL: “52 holds on first copy returned of 1 copy”)....more

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Jul 23, 2011 Jen Padgett Bohle rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: science, blew-my-mind, intellectual-earthquake, sociology, nonfiction, theory, physics

Here's an advertisement I want to place on craigslist because of this book:

Desperately Seeking:
Scintillating conversation partner who is preferably a math, physics, or logic major with strong knowledge of Quantum Physics and Information theory (of today and yesterday)and concepts including, but not limited to, the Babbage/Lovelace Difference Machine, Claude Shannon's math and entropy and cryptology, Turing's machine, logcal paradoxes, Maxwell's demon,The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, Schro...more Here's an advertisement I want to place on craigslist because of this book:

Desperately Seeking:
Scintillating conversation partner who is preferably a math, physics, or logic major with strong knowledge of Quantum Physics and Information theory (of today and yesterday)and concepts including, but not limited to, the Babbage/Lovelace Difference Machine, Claude Shannon's math and entropy and cryptology, Turing's machine, logcal paradoxes, Maxwell's demon,The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, Schrodinger's cat, Richard Dawkins' memes, Goding's proofs, Douglas Hofstadter's EVERYTHING. Lack of arrogance and condescension toward someone who almost failed high school math a must. Must be willing to meet in heavily populated public place.

* * * *

Aside from that, delving into mathematics as James Gleick tells it (algebra, calculus and Boolean logic, mostly ---A watered down version for us math scarred) makes me want to write a letter to every godawful mediocre monotone high school math teacher I ever had (so, all of them) and give them some major shit for not even bothering. Really? Overhead transparencies of meaningless equations and word problems involving trains and lots of bland white kids was all they had? Worksheets and odd numbered problems in a textbook? If I had only known that math is just another way of describing the world, just, ya know, symbolism like Dostoevsky used, but with numbers, and that all that misery and embarrassment and boredom working equations at the blackboard could actually get me closer to the secrets and meaning(s) of life...So, thanks to James Gleick for that too- late realization and doing what the uninspired mathbots should have done years ago. (Are you available for tutoring?)

The Information is by no means an easy read, but if you have some previous knowledge of physics(mine came from having read Brian Greene's Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time and the Texture of something or other and a biography of e = mc2 but I suspect a bit of patience and wikipedia would also be just fine), you should be able to get through this without any major confusion.

Anybody wanna talk physics and Information theory? (less)

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Sep 21, 2012 Gayle rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I begin by saying to my middle school algebra teacher, “Damn, why didn’t you just say so?” At the risk of revealing my age, I can tell you that mathematics as taught in my elementary school era certainly lacked certain clarity in the fact that rote memorization played a totally unnecessary role as far as I was concerned. Luckily for me, I knew how to manipulate money long before I went to school, so the patterns in math were already obvious. Then suddenly there were these little xs and ys and I...more I begin by saying to my middle school algebra teacher, “Damn, why didn’t you just say so?” At the risk of revealing my age, I can tell you that mathematics as taught in my elementary school era certainly lacked certain clarity in the fact that rote memorization played a totally unnecessary role as far as I was concerned. Luckily for me, I knew how to manipulate money long before I went to school, so the patterns in math were already obvious. Then suddenly there were these little xs and ys and I was completely thrown for a loop! “Why are these letters slinking around with my beloved numbers?” I thought. Gee, I wish my teacher had just given me Charles Babbage to read. After the initial shock, the patterns that I knew so well did return and I moved on, loving algebra, but the process would have been so much smoother had someone simply told me to think of the “x” as an empty box waiting for the right number to complete the pattern!

I am not a math and science whiz by any stretch of the imagination; I am, however, in awe of both and always have been. As far as I’m concerned, it takes a bazillion times more creativity to discover and prove a math or science concept than it does to write a story or poem. Literature is limited by the human experience and needs no proof. Math and science have no limits—think universe and ∞—and if you are unable to prove your theory, you will not become a part of the conversation unless, of course, someone else can prove your theory.

The Information, as I see it, is about just that, extraordinary people seeing the patterns first, forming a theory, beginning their proofs, and others building on those proofs until new understandings emerge. It’s an exciting and wonderful journey!

If you are the type of person that must understand and see clearly every concept mentioned in the book you are reading, don’t pick this one up. (Although, I’ve never understood why people who can read Oscar Wilde or T. S. Eliot comfortably can become so uncomfortable reading a book like Mr. Gleick’s that they would put it down and consider it too difficult to understand.) I have a high tolerance for the vague; it doesn’t bother me. There is a lot in this book that is vague to me, but I was constantly rewarded with so many “Ah ha!” moments that it did not interfere with my total enjoyment.

For example, how do you write about a theory before there are clear and concise words to describe it? Words that everyone can agree upon must first be written about. “...where Newton wanted words for nature’s laws, Wittgenstein wanted words for words...” The limitation of words is that you must use words to describe them! Did you know that your teenager wasn’t the first to use expressions such as “lol” and “bff” to communicate? I did not, but when telegrams were charged by the word, people adapted by doing exactly the same thing—see page 154. Then there is the redundancy in language factor demonstrated nicely by one of my favorites, the James Merrill poem and 1970s subway sign “If U Cn Rd Ths, u cn gt a gd jb w hi pa.” “Bit” is a combination of binary and digit. Duh, but I truly did not know this!

Near the end of the story, we go from bits to bytes, to megabytes, gigabytes, terabytes and I found myself reading faster and faster and... as if experiencing the John Lanier quote, “It’s as if you kneel to plant the seed of a tree and it grows so fast that it swallows your whole town before you can even rise to your feet,” up close and personal. (Reminds me of The Blob and Invasion of the Body Snatchers.) We’ve moved from an oral culture where words/impressions were dissipated/forgotten or changed down the line—like kids sitting in a circle playing the game Telephone—to terabytes+ of the same set in code and then disseminated exponentially through our technology. Personally I like that idea; it doesn’t scare me at all. Can you tell? I loved this book!
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Jan 07, 2012 Jenny rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: librarianship, techie, read2012

I have a soft spot for mathematics. The more complicated and obtuse it gets, the more I like it. It is probably best I didn't figure this out earlier in life, because I might have pursued it and gone crazy. So I enjoy reading about it from time to time.

In The Information, Gleick speaks to the interplay between mathematical progress with science, culture, information theory, and really the development of society. It is an incredible overview of topics ranging from logic to communication to memes....more

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May 30, 2012 Ian Tregillis rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This was OK. It wasn't what I was looking for, though, and so I found myself invariably dozing off while trying to finish it. (The insomnia didn't help.)

There is good and interesting stuff here, but it's interspersed with far more stuff that was of little to no interest to me. And the pieces of this book that held my interest were subjects about which I'd already read a fair amount. Ah, well. Not the book's fault. I'm just tired and grumpy.

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Jun 25, 2011 David Wiley rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Only half way through this book but it's one of the best I've read in a very long time. The chapter on Babbage and Lovelace filled me with rapture and awe, and a little bit of jealousy, peeking in on these great discoveries and the heady conversations and frequent advances and discoveries. What must it have been like to work at that level, to discover those things, to be so far ahead of your time? Incredible writing, so well researched, I just love this book... And as a bonus, highly applicable...more

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May 12, 2012 Wm rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: socio-poli-religio-cultural

The History chapters are the best -- the African drum system, Babbage, and the development of the telegraph were all fascinating. Once you get into the 20th century things become more mathematical and abstruse. I didn't understand all the equations. But what the structure of the book does is really show you how the technologies we have now relate to what happened in the past. Gleick weaves theory and storytelling together well. I would have like a bit more of the sociology and less of the theory...more

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Apr 06, 2011 Bookmarks Magazine rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: may-june-2011

“A history-changing, paradigm-altering look at the evolution of the human capacity to process data,” according to the Oregonian, Gleick’s latest book makes even the most unexciting material “brim with tension.” The science can be overwhelming at times (quantum teleportation, anyone?), but Gleick provides clear explanations and analogies. For those less scientifically minded, he keeps the narrative moving along with fascinating facts, colorful digressions, and vivid portraits of long-forgotten in...more

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May 12, 2013 Leon rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

A New York Times Notable Book
ALos Angeles Times and Cleveland Plain Dealer Best Book of the Year
Winner of thePEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award

...more

A New York Times Notable Book
A Los Angeles Times and Cleveland Plain Dealer Best Book of the Year
Winner of the PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award

From the bestselling author of the acclaimed Chaos and Genius comes a thoughtful and provocative exploration of the big ideas of the modern era: Information, communication, and information theory.

Acclaimed science writer James Gleick presents an eye-opening vision of how our relationship to information has transformed the very nature of human consciousness. A fascinating intellectual journey through the history of communication and information, from the language of Africa’s talking drums to the invention of written alphabets; from the electronic transmission of code to the origins of information theory, into the new information age and the current deluge of news, tweets, images, and blogs. Along the way, Gleick profiles key innovators, including Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace, Samuel Morse, and Claude Shannon, and reveals how our understanding of information is transforming not only how we look at the world, but how we live.

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.)
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

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Mar 29, 2013 Kirk Battle rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Part history, part philosophy, the book is a discussion about the earliest forms of communicating information all the way to modern day. There is math, but nothing too scary. Babylonian algorithims, African drum languages, morse code, efficiencies, bit technology...it really does go into everything.

Gleick starts with trying to get the reader to imagine pre-literate society. How much conceiving of words and writing them down changes how we perceive and think of reality. He goes into various psych...more Part history, part philosophy, the book is a discussion about the earliest forms of communicating information all the way to modern day. There is math, but nothing too scary. Babylonian algorithims, African drum languages, morse code, efficiencies, bit technology...it really does go into everything.

Gleick starts with trying to get the reader to imagine pre-literate society. How much conceiving of words and writing them down changes how we perceive and think of reality. He goes into various psych studies of illiterate communities and testing, but he ends up having to cite Plato and Aristotle a lot to explain his point. Small things like bards memorizing lines extrapolate out into efficiency equations for how many characters a language needs in proportion to how long it takes to communicate something.

Favorite part: a comparison between African drum languages and Morse Code. A drum language is phonetic, you're making drum noises that sound like the word. A lot of words end up sounding the same in that setup, so you need to add context. They end up using the bard technique of turning everything into a phrase so you can identify the word based on the phrase being used. You end up having these huge, chatty exchanges over drums this way.

Morse code, on the other hand, is a second level codification of a language. It's an alphabet reduced to two symbols. You pick out the letters that get used the most frequently and make them the shortest, the ones you use the least are the most complex. Prepositional phrases and other contexts get hacked out to save space.

I had trouble following the part where he explains Babylonian math, but apparently you have to do some complex shit if all you have is a stick and a clay tablet when calculating advanced sums. the last two chapters are wonky as Gleick tries to capture the sense of being overwhelmed by information and what we should do about it. There are some gems amongst the tangents, but it felt like he was trying to cram in some last minute stuff that didn't make it in the revisions. I am a sucker for unabridged versions.

Favorite Quote: "Information is not Knowledge and Knowledge is not Wisdom."(less)

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Jan 06, 2013 Dan Allosso rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: futurism

Richard Dawkins’ fundamental contribution to science, says Gleick, is the idea that “Genes, not organisms, are the true units of natural selection” (Kindle Locations 5328-5329). He cites The Selfish Gene, which I really ought to get around to reading again soon. But then he takes it someplace I’m not sure Dawkins intended (although given Dawkins’ conclusion that memes act like genes in the real world, maybe he did…), and suggests that genes are not in fact the strings of base pairs seen under th...more Richard Dawkins’ fundamental contribution to science, says Gleick, is the idea that “Genes, not organisms, are the true units of natural selection” (Kindle Locations 5328-5329). He cites The Selfish Gene, which I really ought to get around to reading again soon. But then he takes it someplace I’m not sure Dawkins intended (although given Dawkins’ conclusion that memes act like genes in the real world, maybe he did…), and suggests that genes are not in fact the strings of base pairs seen under the microscope. They are ideas. After all, Gleick says, “There is no gene for long legs; there is no gene for a leg at all. To build a leg requires many genes…[and what about] more complex qualities—genes for obesity or aggression or nest building or braininess or homosexuality. Are there genes for such things? Not if a gene is a particular strand of DNA that expresses a protein. Strictly speaking, one cannot say there are genes for almost anything—not even eye color. Instead, one should say that differences in genes tend to cause differences in phenotype (the actualized organism).” (Kindle Locations 5414-5421). So what are genes? The information? Or the observed changes in phenotypes that result? Gleick concludes, “The gene is not an information-carrying macromolecule. The gene is the information. (Kindle Location 5462). But what we observe depends on our focus, our values. So once again it’s a confusion between information as signals and information as meaningful data we care about.

Aside: have memes already jumped the shark?

In his section on probability and entropy, Gleick mentions that an infinitely long random string will ultimately include every possible combination. “Given a long enough random string, every possible short-enough substring will appear somewhere. One of them will be the combination to the bank vault. Another will be the encoded complete works of Shakespeare. But they will not do any good, because no one can find them.” (Kindle Locations 5814-5816). But isn’t that the point, if we end up saying the universe is information (which is where this is going)? Because Shakespeare DID find them…

“Researchers have established that human intuition is useless both in predicting randomness and in recognizing it. Humans drift toward pattern willy-nilly” (Kindle Locations 5819-5820). See Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Pi is not random, because it is computable. But if you took the digits between say 1,000 and 2,000,0000 in the string, wouldn’t THAT be a random number? So, in the real world, where context and completeness are not always discernible, don’t we get a lot of apparent randomness that might well be orderly? And that’s not even counting the mysteriousness produced by chaos and quantum indeterminacy. You just can’t get away from mystery. “Given an arbitrary string of a million digits,” Gleick says, “a mathematician knows that it is almost certainly random, complex, and patternless—but cannot be absolutely sure.” He continues, “A chaotic stream of information may yet hide a simple algorithm. Working backward from the chaos to the algorithm may be impossible” (Kindle Locations 6070-6095). You can’t decompile the program, or unstir the coffee (also from Tom Stoppard).

Gleick discusses compression, which at its heart is a process of finding patterns that can be expressed in fewer bits than the original message. But again, we’re operating on something that is already an abstraction. It’s a photograph, or a digitized sound, or a string of text. So all we’re talking about is human perception and language efficiency. Lossy compression is the key to human consciousness. We can’t deal with the reality all around us, so we filter it. This is old philosophy.

John Archibald Wheeler said “It from Bit”: “Every it — every particle, every field of force, even the space-time continuum itself — derives its function, its meaning, its very existence … from bits” (Kindle Locations 6350-6351). But the bits are answers to yes-no questions. They require the questions in order to have any meaning. So once again, we’re talking not about reality, but about human perception of reality. It’s David Hume all over again.

Finally, at the end of it all, Gleick admits “The birth of information theory came with its ruthless sacrifice of meaning — the very quality that gives information its value and its purpose” (Kindle Locations 7462-7463). Yes! Finally!! So the obvious thing to do at this point is to regain subjectivity. At long last we realize “words are not themselves ideas, but merely strings of ink marks; we see that sounds are nothing more than waves. In a modern age without an Author looking down on us from heaven, language is not a thing of definite certainty, but infinite possibility; without the comforting illusion of meaningful order we have no choice but to stare into the face of meaningless disorder…” (Kindle Locations 7505-7507). And make our own meaning.
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Dec 20, 2012 Rob Kitchin rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The Information is billed as the ‘story of how human beings use, transmit and keep what they know’, discussing a series of information revolutions: ‘the invention of writing, the composition of dictionaries, the creation of charts that made navigation possible, the discovery of the electronic signal, and the cracking of the genetic code.’ At best it only does a fraction of this and from a very particular perspective. The book is principally a treatise on information theory within mathematics and...more

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Nov 16, 2012 Johnny rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: science

Can all life be summarized in terms of “bits” of information? Does our world have a predominantly semiotic quality to it? Those are the questions which have been buzzing around my feeble little mind since I first started reading The Information by James Gleick. The story ostensibly begins with Claude Shannon’s idea of measuring information in terms of “bits.” (p. 14 in my eBook version) The idea is that a quantity of information gets through accurately, not a concern for what the specific inform...more

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Oct 14, 2012 Josh rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2012, non-fiction

An extremely interesting--if somewhat sporadically so--accounts of a very important idea that to a large degree governs how our society functions: information. It's a large and diversified topic with a complex history, and certainly not one that can be covered in one book, but Gleick manages a pretty good general introduction to the subject.

What is the subject, you might ask? Information is so broad and vague a term that focusing on any one aspect excludes countless others, but here are a few t...more

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Sep 28, 2012 Clif rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

As a kid I loved to read the books on science by Issac Asimov.

I once had a job (1977) as a night janitor at a telephone switching office - back in the day when there were real live operators on duty for directory assistance, etc.

After finishing up my duties - cleaning ash trays, emptying wastebaskets, I would go to the basement, pull up a chair by the huge array of batteries that (still) provide backup power for the wired telephone system and read Asimov explaining the structure of the atom and...more As a kid I loved to read the books on science by Issac Asimov.

I once had a job (1977) as a night janitor at a telephone switching office - back in the day when there were real live operators on duty for directory assistance, etc.

After finishing up my duties - cleaning ash trays, emptying wastebaskets, I would go to the basement, pull up a chair by the huge array of batteries that (still) provide backup power for the wired telephone system and read Asimov explaining the structure of the atom and how electricity works. I couldn't get enough of how things worked.

James Gleick follows in the Asimov tradition as a science writer for the masses but he gets in pretty deep.

The book is divided as the title describes into three sections - one about the history of information, one about the theory that developed to explain it, and finally a look at the flood of it that we are now experiencing. Throughout is that wonderful sense of excitement, discovery and adventurous thinking that Asimov was so good at relating.

There are many remarkable things in this book, one of which is an account of how writing changed the way we think from what it had been before. A different mental operation is at work when you relate things aurally, about things that you have seen, than when you write in symbols that bring up concepts that cannot be physically experienced. Also mentioned is the fact that writing is not evolutionary - in the sense that stone-age humans would have been able to write if they were instructed; The potential has been there all along. This kind of thing makes me eager to turn every page for more.

When Gleick gets into the theory of information even more fascination awaits. What is the information content of a printed character, of a dot or a dash of Morse code, of a photo? Much thinking went into analysis of communication before Claude Shannon came up with a formula for specifying the amount of information precisely - it has to do with novelty, unpredictability, and complexity but is completely independent of the meaning we place on communication. Now do I have your interest?

But things get deep. Here is an example from where I got completely lost...

" 'Feynman's insight,' says Bennett, 'was that a quantum system is, in a sense, computing its own future all the time. You may say it's an analog computer of its own dynamics.' Researchers quickly realized that if a quantum computer had special powers in cutting though problems in simulating physics, it might be able to solve other types of intractable problems as well."

Have you got that? Fortunately, the book doesn't often get this deep and right after the above quote the author leaves the theory for the flood section - much easier to swallow!

So step right up and challenge your mind to a roller coaster ride. There will be times when you will s-l-o-w d-o-w-n just as a coaster does when climbing the first height, but then you will find elation as you zoom into new ideas!(less)

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Sep 27, 2012 Dann rated it 4 of 5 stars

Before reading this book, if you would have asked me about 'information theory', I would have had no idea what to say. To be completely honest, I still can't explain it to you. The 'Flood' part of the title is really a good way to describe this book. It's a huge amount of information in a small space, and can be a bit overwhelming. But it's a really fun read, and it's absolutely fascinating.

The 'History' part of the title is really applicable to the whole book—it goes from early, early forms of...more

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Sep 20, 2012 Peter Gelfan rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I suspect the author found sorting through the material for his earlier book CHAOS a far more orderly task than it was for THE INFORMATION. Instead of a concise explanation of information theory, we get a chronological survey of the general topic that ranges from humanity’s very first high-speed, long-distance information transmission network (jungle drums) to the latest theoretical developments, which posit that information is even more fundamental to the physical universe than is substance, fo...more

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May 03, 2012 Alan rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: Digital beings busy being digital

Recommended to Alan by: Its topic; previous work

"Information."

That's what the shadowy captors of Number Six demand, in the opening to the famed 1960s TV series "The Prisoner." He responds defiantly, "You won't get it." But of course his very defiance conveyed some information to them... and if they'd had James Gleick's The Information on hand, they might have gleaned even more from Patrick McGoohan's best-known character. For The Information contains a wealth of information about all the ways information can be conveyed across time and across...more

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Apr 21, 2012 William Ramsay rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The Information is an interesting book about how the concept of information came into being. Of course, it seems we must always have had information, facts that we know, but that's not quite what Gleick is getting at. When you begin to see that codes can carry messages that hold information, then you begin to get an inkling of a far more complex definition of information. For instance, DNA, a code of chemical identifiers, holds the information about you and I and much of our past. Bits and bytes...more

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Apr 19, 2012 Karen Chung rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The book gets off to a strong and engaging start by discussing African talking drums and the many things Europeans learned about information sharing from the art. The coverage of the work and life of Charles Babbage greatly expanded on the bit I knew about him previously. Most interesting to me were the parts on Claude Shannon and Alan Turing. Though I have already read a good deal on information theory and the work and lives of these two men, I have marked many passages in chapters 6 through 12...more

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Jan 31, 2012 Loring Wirbel rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Since I was absolutely astonished by such Gleick works as "Chaos" and "What Just Happened", and since his subject matter (Claude Shannon, Godel, info theory) is right up my alley, I was prepared to give this book five stars, particularly given raves in NY Times Book Review and elsewhere. Quite honestly, I'm tending toward the Goodreads consensus of four stars, leaning to a high three. And the reasons for that are quite specific.

Gleick pulls all the right ingredients together - Charles Babbage, L...more Since I was absolutely astonished by such Gleick works as "Chaos" and "What Just Happened", and since his subject matter (Claude Shannon, Godel, info theory) is right up my alley, I was prepared to give this book five stars, particularly given raves in NY Times Book Review and elsewhere. Quite honestly, I'm tending toward the Goodreads consensus of four stars, leaning to a high three. And the reasons for that are quite specific.

Gleick pulls all the right ingredients together - Charles Babbage, Lady Ada Lovelace, Claude Shannon, Alan Turing, Kurt Godel, Norbert Wiener. He gives us unique quotes from Lady Lovelace's letters, odd anecdotes of Shannon and Godel meeting at Princeton. The book is lively and readable for the most part, though the odd algebraic algorithm might scare some people. And yet, and yet.... Something feels like a perfectly prepared pudding or souffle that wasn't cooked at the right temperature, leading to a failure to set properly.

Perhaps the problem is that Gleick set a high bar for himself with "Chaos", and a high bar was set for incompleteness theorem and information with Douglas Hofstadter's "Godel Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid." Gleick quotes at length from Hofstadter, to be sure, but he doesn't achieve quite the sense of astonishment and whimsy that Hofstadter did when GEB first came out in the early 1980s. Maybe I was expecting Gleick to provide a new theory of what happens when incompleteness meets infinite recursiveness meets the compressed-code condition where a single symbol stands for a universe of meaning. Maybe that was a ridiculous expectation.

This book makes a wonderful companion to Hofstadter's GEB, William Gibson's "The Difference Engine", and similar works. It makes Shannon and Turing seem like real people, though it does not delve into the heartache of Turing's persecution as a homosexual, which several biographies of Turing have done. Gleick ends the book with a marvelous treatise on Wikipedia's reason for being in this world, and a suggestion that we are running into a new recursiveness when an ever-expanding Wikipedia begins to stand for all sentient knowledge in the universe - have we gained anything in library management or data compression? Still, Gleick manages to end the book on an optimistic note, not wringing his hands too anxiously over information overload, etc.

Remember, a pudding or souffle that comes out of the oven a little too runny still can make for good eating, and Gleick's book is often yummy. Just don't expect "The Information" to reach new frontiers of information theory. It's just a dime map of the reef, and that's OK.(less)

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Dec 24, 2011 Michael Burnam-fink rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2011, history

Gleick manages something incredibly, a deeply scholarly work that is also highly accessible. Today, information is like air, or water to a fish, so omnipresent we do not even see it. But Gleick traces the origins of this strange concept back through the technologies of the difference engine, telegraphy, writing, and speech; and the theories of mathematican Claude Shannon and a host of allied thinkers. Information has infected biology, physics, psychology, mathematics, and almost every other scie...more

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Aug 23, 2011 Jamie rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Jame's Gleick's The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood is kind of all over the place, as you might expect given its nebulous subject matter. The author intends to do pretty much what the subtitle suggests: review the history of information as a concept, dive into the scientific field of information theory, and ponder what recent volume of information flow means for us as a society or even as a species. As such, it's a mix of history, hard science, and even a dash of speculation.

My favorit...more Jame's Gleick's The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood is kind of all over the place, as you might expect given its nebulous subject matter. The author intends to do pretty much what the subtitle suggests: review the history of information as a concept, dive into the scientific field of information theory, and ponder what recent volume of information flow means for us as a society or even as a species. As such, it's a mix of history, hard science, and even a dash of speculation.

My favorite parts of the book were the history of science bits, which Gleick presents after what seems to be exhaustive and comprehensive research. He traces the evolution of information as a concept, starting around the invention of the written word, then working up through the time line and pointing out landmarks like the printing press, the discovery of logarithms, the telegraph, Morse code, the telephone, the computer, the Internet, and the like. Each of these is discussed in the context of how they shaped the abstract concept of "information" and all led to the inevitable creation of a theory of information. I also loved learning about all the people behind these inventions and discoveries, and Gleick delivers the best bits of biographies on characters like Samuel Morse, Alan Turing, Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace (nee Byron), Claude Shannon, James Maxwell, and more. These parts of the book were replete with fun facts and amusing stories, like the woman who tried to "send" a bowl of sauerkraut by the newly invented telegraph or how the editors of the Oxford Dictionary decide what new words to add each edition. It's all very educational and made me think of information and the information technology around me in new ways. I always love learning about visionaries and how they made their mark.

The sections on the formal theory of information, though, were also enjoyable, but to my layman mind they were sometimes dense to the point of being impenetrable. Gleick doesn't shy away from the hard stuff, and his discussion of information theory is flung far enough to cover many fields: mathematics, cybernetics, quantum theory, psychology, electrical engineering, chemistry, astrophysics, computer programming, genetics, history, cryptology, and more. And while Gleick doesn't revel in jargon and he makes many attempts to keep things at a high level, much of the book is unavoidably scholarly. Still, I was usually able to follow along with the WHAT he was getting at, if not the HOW. And it really is impressive how widely he casts his net.

And I'm glad I did. While some of the finer points may have been lost on me, I enjoyed the history of science treatment and got enough of it to get a feel for the shape of information theory and how the general concept of information has evolved and been revealed through advances in philosophy, science, and technology --what it is, how it's measured, where it goes, and what its properties are. It's heady stuff, but fun to think about.(less)

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Aug 01, 2011 Gary Schroeder rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This book could have alternately been titled "A History of the Bit: How the bit made modern communication, computing, logic, an understanding of biology and a whole bunch of other stuff possible." It's James Gleick's extremely ambitious attempt to wrap his arms around the entirety of the expansive concept of "information." To the uninitiated, "information" might seem like a rather straightforward concept, unworthy of a 400+ page book. After all, what is there to say about a concept that we all c...more This book could have alternately been titled "A History of the Bit: How the bit made modern communication, computing, logic, an understanding of biology and a whole bunch of other stuff possible." It's James Gleick's extremely ambitious attempt to wrap his arms around the entirety of the expansive concept of "information." To the uninitiated, "information" might seem like a rather straightforward concept, unworthy of a 400+ page book. After all, what is there to say about a concept that we all commonly refer to, understand, and take for granted? Quite a bit, as it turns out.

The good news is that this is not another book about the history of computing, from the Gutenberg press to the Macintosh. There are more than enough books on that topic. So, exactly what is it about? It's hard to be succinct about that. It might be better to offer a listing of broad topics covered.

He starts with the most basic of communication systems: the African drum -- a method of communication over distances that surprised early european colonizers with its apparent accuracy and specificity. From here, he moves to Babbage's mechanical difference engine and the first organized thoughts about the nature of information itself. When one has to carry out mechanical computation, it seems to be universal that an analysis of what comprises information quickly ensues. A new branch of philosophy is born.

Succeeding chapters cover technologies we typically associate with the transmission of information: telegraphy and telephony. Telegraphy introduces the idea of creating one set of symbols that can represent another set. In this case, dots and dashes for an alphabet. Twenty six characters are reduced to two. Telegraphy also introduced the need to reduce even further the number of characters by which a message could be clearly received, as in representing common phrases by a series of three digit numbers. Such a reduction costs the transmitter less money to send and enables the owner of the system to send more messages in the same time, earning them more money. This is information compression in its simplest form. Sending a message through an intermediary (a telegrapher) also means that you might want to hide the meaning of the message from them. This leads to ciphers and other methods of encoding. The sender and the receiver share a common key for decoding.

Telephony reduced the barriers to telecommunication by reducing the middle man, saved money for businesses by reducing the need for messengers and increasing the speed of messages. Telephony also drove further information technology innovations. Phone companies (or THE phone company at the time) devoted considerable resources to dealing with problems of long distance transmission of voice information over inherently "lossy" copper wires. Sifting meaningful signal from distance-induced static and noise became of focus of some particularly talented engineers. Analysis of this problem lead to mathematical abstractions as they tried to reduce "information" to the lowest possible common denominator. How small of a signal can carry a message? How can "message" be defined mathematically? The idea of the "bit" became common and the field of information theory began to take off. It had existed before, but it had never flowered in the way that modern communications forced it to. Claude Shannon is a central figure in the development of modern information theory and his revolutionary ideas are quoted extensively throughout the book. Parallel developments in information theory occurred with Alan Turing who developed the theoretical basis for computing before any of the hardware existed.

Some familiar computing history themes are then covered in which Gleick reviews projects undertaken during World War II to create mechanical systems capable of shooting down fast moving aircraft from the ground. These projects produced mathematical methods for estimating random motion and predicting probabilities, problems very similar to the efforts of phone engineers to separate signal from noise.

What Gleick tries to get across is the idea that the developments in information theory, some of which are concepts that we take for granted today, are in fact not intuitive at all. The idea that all information could be conveyed by nothing more than two states, on and off, yes or no, was revolutionary. For people of the era, these ideas would be like suggesting the existence of a new color that no one had ever imagined before. Shocking, like an intuitive leap that seemed to come from nowhere.

Information theory has implications for...well, just about everything in existence. It has implications for biology. The basic units of heredity, the genes, carry a certain number of bits of information needed to describe traits. DNA molecules can be thought of as biological memory storage devices, mere transmitters of information. It also has things to say about memes, self-replicating packets of information. Gleick quotes Dawkins and wonders if they're like genes, existing to propagate themselves.

Towards the end of the book, he advances to modern developments of the past 30 years or so such as information compression and quantum information science. As part of this journey, Gleick tries to cover some very challenging mathematical topics like randomness, incompleteness theorems, the absolute computability of numbers and chaos. These sections are less successful. I got the feeling that he felt the need to include them, but felt that he could not adequately reduce them to a level that even an industrious layman could handle. Many terms are introduced which are never thoroughly explained, or which are explained tautologically, using poorly explained concepts to label new ones.

Finally, he ends with a light analysis of the cultural implications of the info-clogged modern world: information fatigue, information glut, and the devaluation of information that is ubiquitously available for the first time in history.

This is a big topic...indeed, a massive one. While "The Information" rambles on in places and seems disjointed in others, it's an important book. It brings the philosophy and science of information itself to a lay audience. Mathematicians and philosophers will be familiar with many of the concepts it contains, but this may be the first book that attempts to bring these rigorously technical fields to the masses in an easily digestible form. (less)

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May 27, 2011 Courtney Johnston rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: abandoned, big-ideas-made-accessible, books-about-books, borrowed, history

Put aside, rather than abandoned; I hope to pick Gleick's masterly,
but slow-paced, tome up later in the year, but right now my brain is
scurrying about at a pace ill-suited to this book.

You could read into the sentence above that I am one of the victims
of the information age - so distracted by the deluge of digital
information available to me that I can't concentrate on the type-set
page before me. However, I don't believe in information overload; one
of the reasons I want to return to 'The Informat...more

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May 24, 2011 Yothgoboufnir rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The Information has a lot going for it. And it has a lot going against it.

For starters, Gleick keeps the read enjoyable with his strong prose style. The author controls the pace and tone of his writing to carry readers along almost cinematically. Indeed, many passages read like the voice-over of a History Channel program, while simultaneously conjuring for readers the images that would play under the voice-over. It is a strong effect, engrossing and enjoyable.

The other big strong point of The In...more

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May 14, 2011 Zach rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This book is best looked at in terms of hard and soft facts. It's most rewarding when it presents hard facts, the stuff of the sciences, theories and speculations explained by Gleick in exceptional, clear English. The book was less rewarding in the soft sections, the history and the humanity. Some of this is of course necessary to move the narrative forward. For example, Gleick does an effective job championing Claude Shannon as the most important voice in the history of information theory. But...more This book is best looked at in terms of hard and soft facts. It's most rewarding when it presents hard facts, the stuff of the sciences, theories and speculations explained by Gleick in exceptional, clear English. The book was less rewarding in the soft sections, the history and the humanity. Some of this is of course necessary to move the narrative forward. For example, Gleick does an effective job championing Claude Shannon as the most important voice in the history of information theory. But more often, the asides into the historical facts surrounding the people making the discoveries that are the meat of The Information simply detracts from the hard material. I include this criticism mainly as a means to point out that the hard material is excellent. Before reading, I lacked even a layman's understanding of information theory. During reading, I flagged page after page, concept after concept, and upon completion, while I may not be contributing any equations to the mathematics of information theory, I at least know what the big deal is all about.

I'd recommend this for anyone who likes thinking about the theoretical implications of science without having to deal with the math. Once a terrible student of math myself, this book led me to an interesting realization: I do find math fascinating, I just always knew I'd never work to reach the level of mathematical understanding necessary to get to the interesting parts; high school trig formulas didn't offer any reward. This book shows even the mathematically disinclined where that reward exists.

One last criticism in what I hope is an otherwise positive review: the book ends too softly. The last chapter and the epilogue abandon almost completely the hardness of earlier chapters, partly due to the required, I suppose, section on the modern internet, which seems too familiar to be challenging (and the truly challenging ideas about it have yet to be realized), but mainly because it tries to bring things to a human level, when I think a better strategy (and one Gleick uses well throughout) is to bring the human up to the level of the ideas. I didn't want to be brought home in the end. I wanted to be sent back out into the universe the previous 400 pages had shown me.(less)

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May 01, 2011 Scotchneat rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction, outcasts, sci-fi-fantasy

I wrote a more complete review on my blog.

As with Chaos, Gleick displays a mastery and a passion for the history of ideas while creating new connections himself. Thinkers great and small come to life, and he has a real knack for surfacing exactly the right quote or life detail in a the life of whatever thought he’s following.

Gleick starts (and ends) with Shannon – that odd man from Bell Labs whose information theory is one of the most important developments of thought in the 20th Century, and wh...more

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About James Gleick

James Gleick (born August 1, 1954) is an American author, journalist, and biographer, whose books explore the cultural ramifications of science and technology. Three of these books have been Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalists, and they have been translated into more than twenty languages.

Born in New York City, USA, Gleick attended Harvard College, graduating in 1976 with a degree in...more James Gleick (born August 1, 1954) is an American author, journalist, and biographer, whose books explore the cultural ramifications of science and technology. Three of these books have been Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalists, and they have been translated into more than twenty languages.

Born in New York City, USA, Gleick attended Harvard College, graduating in 1976 with a degree in English and linguistics. Having worked for the Harvard Crimson and freelanced in Boston, he moved to Minneapolis, where he helped found a short-lived weekly newspaper, Metropolis. After its demise, he returned to New York and joined as staff of the New York Times, where he worked for ten years as an editor and reporter.

He was the McGraw Distinguished Lecturer at Princeton University in 1989-90. Gleick collaborated with the photographer Eliot Porter on Nature's Chaos and with developers at Autodesk on Chaos: The Software. In 1993, he founded The Pipeline, an early Internet service. Gleick is active on the boards of the Authors Guild and the Key West Literary Seminar.

His first book, Chaos: Making a New Science, an international best-seller, chronicled the development of chaos theory and made the Butterfly Effect a household phrase.

Among the scientists Gleick profiled were Mitchell Feigenbaum, Stephen Jay Gould, Douglas Hofstadter, Richard Feynman and Benoit Mandelbrot. His early reporting on Microsoft anticipated the antitrust investigations by the U. S. Department of Justice and the European Commission. Gleick's essays charting the growth of the Internet included the "Fast Forward" column on technology in the New York Times Magazine from 1995 to 1999 and formed the basis of his book What Just Happened. His work has also appeared in The New Yorker, the Atlantic, Slate, and the Washington Post.

Bibliography:
1987 Chaos: Making a New Science, Viking Penguin. (ISBN 0140092501)
1990 (with Eliot Porter) Nature's Chaos, Viking Penguin. (ISBN 0316609420)
1992 Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman, Pantheon. (ISBN 0679747044)
1999 Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything, Pantheon. (ISBN 067977548X)
2000 (editor) The Best American Science Writing 2000, HarperCollins. (ISBN 0060957360)
2002 What Just Happened: A Chronicle from the Electronic Frontier, Pantheon. (ISBN 0375713913)
2003 Isaac Newton, Pantheon. (ISBN 1400032954)
2011 The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood. New York: Pantheon Books. (ISBN 9780375423727 )(less)

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“When information is cheap, attention becomes expensive.” — 26 people liked it

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