The information : a history, a theory, a flood / James Gleick.
Publisher: New York : Pantheon, c2011Description: 526 p. ill., map, ports.; 25 cm001: 14865ISBN: 0375423729; 9780375423727Subject(s): Communication -- History | Information society | Information science -- History | Information superhighway -- HistoryDDC classification: 302.209 LOC classification: Z665 | .G547 2011Item type | Current library | Collection | Call number | Copy number | Status | Date due | Barcode | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Book | MAIN LIBRARY Book | 302.209 GLE (Browse shelf(Opens below)) | 1 | Available | 089378 |
Browsing MAIN LIBRARY shelves, Shelving location: Book, Collection: PRINT Close shelf browser (Hides shelf browser)
Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:
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.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents provided by Syndetics
- Prologue (p. 3)
- 1 Drums That Talk (p. 13)
- 2 The Persistence of the Word (p. 28)
- 3 Two Wordbooks (p. 51)
- 4 To Throw the Powers of Thought into Wheel-Work (p. 78)
- 5 A Nervous System for the Earth (p. 125)
- 6 New Wires, New Logic (p. 168)
- 7 Information Theory (p. 204)
- 8 The Informational Turn (p. 233)
- 9 Entropy and Its Demons (p. 269)
- 10 Life's Own Code (p. 287)
- 11 Into the Meme Pool (p. 310)
- 12 The Sense of Randomness (p. 324)
- 13 Information Is Physical (p. 355)
- 14 After the Flood (p. 373)
- 15 New News Every Day (p. 398)
- Epilogue (p. 413)
- Acknowledgments (p. 427)
- Notes (p. 429)
- Bibliography (p. 477)
- Index (p. 505)
Excerpt provided by Syndetics
Reviews provided by Syndetics
Library Journal Review
Gleick chronicles the story of information and how it has transformed human thought and life, covering quantum mechanics, the structure of DNA, and more. Rob Shapiro's narration effortlessly guides listeners through this dense material and renders it accessible to science and technology enthusiasts and general readers alike. (LJ 7/11) (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.Publishers Weekly Review
Overwhelmed as we are with today's unceasing gush of information-some essential, some useless, and much falling into the broad middle of the spectrum-a study of how we got here and the innovators who played a part in creating the dazzling web of contemporary communications could not be more timely. Gleick's survey of pioneers of information, from Alan Turing to Claude Shannon, follows the many-layered strands forming the information superhighway. Rob Shapiro, slightly nasal, reads in measured fashion, pausing luxuriously between sentences and paragraphs to allow Gleick's own gush of information to sink in. Shapiro's stateliness makes for an artful contrast with Gleick's study of go-go modernity; listening to the audiobook manages to not add to the feeling of being overwhelmed. A Pantheon hardcover. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.CHOICE Review
In this bulky book, master science-storyteller Gleick (Chaos, CH, Feb'88; Faster, 1999, etc.) presents the multifarious aspects of information. The term "information" is used by everyone, and it bombards people in a hundred different ways day in and day out. But what exactly is this intangible bomb, measured in bits, which has influenced human consciousness and civilization in profound ways? And who were some of the principal actors who in different ways thrust information into the human psyche and society? In this sophisticated narrative, which reads like a journalist's report as well as a learned treatise, readers get numerous insights on many apparently unconnected items ranging from the drumbeats of Africa to DNA, from Babylonian culture to (Charles) Babbage, from (Claude) Shannon to superposition, and more. Readers also learn about telegraphy, telephony, and thermodynamics. Gleick's writing is full of anecdotes and tidbits, along with keen comments and literary references, all very fascinating and relevant to the current age. This book is critical reading for anyone wanting to graduate from college in the 21st century, for it reminds readers in an informed and informative way of what information is all about. It will make readers see the world more intelligently than before. Summing Up: Essential. All levels/libraries. V. V. Raman emeritus, Rochester Institute of TechnologyBooklist Review
*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.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 BooklistKirkus Book Review
Think your inbox is jammed now, your attention span overtaxed? It's only the beginning, writes pop-science writer Gleick (Isaac Newton, 2003, etc.) in this tour of information and the theory that goes along with it.It has been a long progression toward the infoglut of today. The author chooses as a logical if unanticipated starting point the talking drums of Africa, an information technology that delivers a satisfying amount of signal in all the noise. From those drums to Morse code, and indeed to binary signaling, is a pretty short hopand one that Gleick takes, writing along the way about such things as how Samuel Morse and his partner decided which letters were the most used in English, and therefore merited the shortest sequences of dot and dash. The author tours through the earliest information technologiesthe intaglio scratches of stone and bone on prehistoric caves, the emergent ideographs of the first Chinese scripts and so onbefore getting into the meatier mathematics of more recent times, which led Charles Babbage, say, to ponder the workings of the first oh-so-clunky computers. As Gleick writes, Babbage surrounded himself with fellow science nerds who agreed to write and send scientific papers to one another every six months, though if a member were delayed by a year, "it shall be taken for granted that his relatives had shut him up as insane." The discussion becomes more complex with the intersection of modern physics. In the emergence of Claude Shannon and Alan Turing's first stirrings of modern information theory, the author's skills as an interpreter of science shine. None of his discussion will be news to readers of Tim Wu's exemplaryThe Master Switch(2010) or of the oldCoevolution Quarterly, but Gleick covers the ground in a way that no other book quite manages to do.Gleick loves the layered detail, which might cause some to sigh, "TMI." But for completist cybergeeks and infojunkies, the book delivers a solid summary of a dense, complex subject.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.There are no comments on this title.