The Information

This book starts in a similar historical location as Bod’s book but quickly moves through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—settling into the “information theory” era established by Claude Shannon, Norbert Wiener, and others in the 1940s-1960s.

I love this book because it situates the intellectual climate leading to our current dystopia of information overload. Gleick’s teasing of chaos theory inevitably pushes the reader to explore his book on the subject from the 1980s: Chaos: Making a New Science (1987).

This remarkably thorough and well researched book gives a sense of the sweep of history of the ideas that underpin the digital revolution. These are topics that I know really well, but the book added texture and nuance and I found myself reading it with eyes wide open and jaw slightly slack.

Gleick is a great story teller and he has dug into the topics and their implications so well that I felt like I had a front-row seat to the invention of Morse Code, "memes", and the theory of information itself. Quite an accomplishment!

Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer James Gleick surveys the history of the information age in this sweeping, wildly ambitious narrative that spans a range of topics from African talking drums to the invention of the telegraph, early computing, and the emergence of the Internet and contemporary networked culture.

The book shines in its coverage of computer science pioneers like nineteenth-century mathematician Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon (who paved the way for modern information theory), Alan Turing (inventor of the first modern computer), and cybernetics theorist Norbert Wiener.

Gleick does an astonishingly good job of dissecting dense theoretical material and making it accessible… show more.

I started my career in science by responding to a job posting for a research assistant for an information scientist. I did get hired but as I had come from the arts, I had never heard of this field. I soon got up to speed and realized how much we are engulfed in a world of information.

Gleick’s book takes us on a historical tour of the concept of information, starting out with early writing systems, then taking us on a deep dive through Claude Shannon’s information theory, and then on to information in terms of bits and bytes as… show more.

We are often reminded that we live in the Information Age and this witty, lucid, wide-ranging book tells how that happened and what it means. Ada plays an important role, but it is the stage that matters here. Where did she fit in, how have her ideas helped to create our world? Gleick’s profound erudition equips him to link all the disparate fields that make up Information. Ada, with her appetite for all kinds of ideas, from flight, to rainbows, musical composition, mesmerism, electricity, hydrodynamics, poetry, ethics, and, of course, information, embodies an ongoing transformation of human consciousness.  Gleick introduces her… show more.