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The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood Hardcover – Deckle Edge, March 1, 2011

4.4 out of 5 stars 1,512 ratings

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James Gleick, the author of the best sellers Chaos and Genius, now brings us a work just as astonishing and masterly: a revelatory chronicle and meditation that shows how information has become the modern era’s defining quality—the blood, the fuel, the vital principle of our world.
 
The story of information begins in a time profoundly unlike our own, when every thought and utterance vanishes as soon as it is born. From the invention of scripts and alphabets to the long-misunderstood talking drums of Africa, Gleick tells the story of information technologies that changed the very nature of human consciousness. He provides portraits of the key figures contributing to the inexorable development of our modern understanding of information: Charles Babbage, the idiosyncratic inventor of the first great mechanical computer; Ada Byron, the brilliant and doomed daughter of the poet, who became the first true programmer; pivotal figures like Samuel Morse and Alan Turing; and Claude Shannon, the creator of information theory itself.
 
And then the information age arrives. Citizens of this world become experts willy-nilly: aficionados of bits and bytes. And we sometimes feel we are drowning, swept by a deluge of signs and signals, news and images, blogs and tweets.
The Information is the story of how we got here and where we are heading.

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Amazon Best Books of the Month, March 2011: In a sense, The Information is a book about everything, from words themselves to talking drums, writing and lexicography, early attempts at an analytical engine, the telegraph and telephone, ENIAC, and the ubiquitous computers that followed. But that's just the "History." The "Theory" focuses on such 20th-century notables as Claude Shannon, Norbert Wiener, Alan Turing, and others who worked on coding, decoding, and re-coding both the meaning and the myriad messages transmitted via the media of their times. In the "Flood," Gleick explains genetics as biology's mechanism for informational exchange--Is a chicken just an egg's way of making another egg?--and discusses self-replicating memes (ideas as different as earworms and racism) as information's own evolving meta-life forms. Along the way, readers learn about music and quantum mechanics, why forgetting takes work, the meaning of an "interesting number," and why "[t]he bit is the ultimate unsplittable particle." What results is a visceral sense of information's contemporary precedence as a way of understanding the world, a physical/symbolic palimpsest of self-propelled exchange, the universe itself as the ultimate analytical engine. If Borges's "Library of Babel" is literature's iconic cautionary tale about the extreme of informational overload, Gleick sees the opposite, the world as an endlessly unfolding opportunity in which "creatures of the information" may just recognize themselves. --Jason Kirk

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. In 1948, Bell Laboratories announced the invention of the electronic semiconductor and its revolutionary ability to do anything a vacuum tube could do but more efficiently. While the revolution in communications was taking these steps, Bell Labs scientist Claude Shannon helped to write a monograph for them, A Mathematical Theory of Communication, in which he coined the word bit to name a fundamental unit of computer information. As bestselling author Gleick (Chaos) astutely argues, Shannon's neologism profoundly changed our view of the world; his brilliant work introduced us to the notion that a tiny piece of hardware could transmit messages that contained meaning and that a physical unit, a bit, could measure a quality as elusive as information. Shannon's story is only one of many in this sprawling history of information. With his brilliant ability to synthesize mounds of details and to tell rich stories, Gleick leads us on a journey from one form of communicating information to another, beginning with African tribes' use of drums and including along the way scientists like Samuel B. Morse, who invented the telegraph; Norbert Wiener, who developed cybernetics; and Ada Byron, the great Romantic poet's daughter, who collaborated with Charles Babbage in developing the first mechanical computer. Gleick's exceptional history of culture concludes that information is indeed the blood, the fuel, and the vital principle on which our world runs. (Apr.)
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Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Pantheon
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ March 1, 2011
  • Edition ‏ : ‎ First Edition, First Printing
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 544 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0375423729
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0375423727
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.25 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.74 x 1.85 x 9.66 inches
  • Best Sellers Rank: #156,737 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.4 out of 5 stars 1,512 ratings

About the author

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James Gleick
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James Gleick was born in New York and began his career in journalism, working as an editor and reporter for the New York Times. He covered science and technology there, chronicling the rise of the Internet as the Fast Forward columnist, and in 1993 founded an Internet startup company called The Pipeline. His books have been translated into more than twenty-five languages.

His home page is at http://around.com, and on Twitter he is @JamesGleick.

Customer reviews

4.4 out of 5 stars
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Customers say

Customers appreciate this book's comprehensive coverage of information theory, from drums of Africa to quantum entanglement, and find it a wonderful read that's easy to read in spurts. The writing quality is well-received, with one customer noting it's aimed at the intelligent lay reader. While some customers find the pacing good, others describe it as tedious, and the narrative quality receives mixed reviews.

124 customers mention "Information quality"107 positive17 negative

Customers appreciate the book's comprehensive coverage of information theory, with one customer highlighting its skillful historical arc.

"I found this book well-written. It was interesting, stimulating and educational...." Read more

"comprehensive, informative, background a bit more than necessary, thought provoking, mathematics interesting but not overwhelming, minimum..." Read more

"This book is very informative." Read more

"...Overall I found the book to be very enjoyable and educational, adding considerably to my previous knowledge of Mr Shannon's work and bringing me new..." Read more

100 customers mention "Readability"98 positive2 negative

Customers find the book highly readable, describing it as a wonderful and joyous read that is among the most important books to read.

"Great book with a startling new perspective on consciousness and sentience...." Read more

"...This new book, "The Information," is an excellent read...." Read more

"..." rambles on in places and seems disjointed in others, it's an important book...." Read more

"...If the book had ended with Chapter 10, it would have remained a very good book, if not incomplete...." Read more

62 customers mention "Writing quality"48 positive14 negative

Customers praise the writing quality of the book, finding it well-organized and easy to read in spurts. One customer notes that the author writes with deep knowledge, while another describes it as an accessible overview of information theory.

"I found this book well-written. It was interesting, stimulating and educational...." Read more

"...Great writing. Ada Lovelace is a G" Read more

"...Some chapters are masterpieces, and those that aren’t are still beautifully written." Read more

"Written for a popular audience, sometimes difficult to follow but written in an easy style that kept me reading through the difficult patches...." Read more

11 customers mention "Information theory"11 positive0 negative

Customers appreciate the book's exploration of information theory, with one customer noting how it traces processes from drums of Africa to quantum entanglement.

"...and science of communications...in all its forms, from African drums to quantum entanglement...." Read more

"...], which is also a popular book about information theory...." Read more

""The Information" is a detailed of every kind of information you can think of...." Read more

"This is an outstanding look at both the history and the cultural significance of information...." Read more

5 customers mention "Charm"5 positive0 negative

Customers appreciate the charm of the book, with one noting its scintillating conversation style and ability to draw connections between subjects, while another highlights its many charming first-hand quotes.

"...Desperately Seeking: Scintillating conversation partner who is preferably a math, physics, or logic major with strong knowledge of Quantum..." Read more

"...Charles Babbage to transistors, and Gleick is so good at drawing connections between these subjects that it never feels disjointed...." Read more

"...description of the arc of information history, with many charming first hand quotes. Engaging prose especially toward the end." Read more

"...an important viewpoint on the nature of information and human communication." Read more

22 customers mention "Pacing"8 positive14 negative

Customers have mixed opinions about the pacing of the book, with some finding it good while others describe it as tedious.

"...Also chapters do not have a summary. Pretty tedious." Read more

"This is a useful, informative book...." Read more

"...The Information is by no means an easy read, but if you have some previous knowledge of physics..." Read more

"...As a history, it has great moments, interspersed IMO by long-winded indulgent sequences that could have been edited down with little loss to the..." Read more

11 customers mention "Narrative quality"3 positive8 negative

Customers find the narrative quality of the book unsatisfactory, with one customer noting that the final chapters are weak, while another mentions that the chapters are long-winded and boring.

"...These sections are less successful...." Read more

"...I found a few chapters long-winded and boring - with a lot of flowery words and little substance...." Read more

"...The chapters delving into meaning, including the fantastic Into the Meme Pool, will have the widest appeal to general readers such as myself...." Read more

"...The final chapters are a bit weak in my opinion, especially following such solid work as the preceding chapters...." Read more

Top reviews from the United States

  • Reviewed in the United States on March 29, 2011
    The Information, extraordinary for its universal breadth and depth, is an outstanding survey of the Information Age, its roots, growth, and fruition. In the words of Seth Lloyd: "To do anything requires energy. To specify what is done requires information." And that is what Gleick quite successfully sets out to do: specify what the Information Age is all about.

    Where others - McLuhan say - offer their own insights, Gleick integrates the findings of philosophers, mathematicians, physicists, biologists, engineers, explorers, authors, and those who have implemented information technologies over the millennia into the mandala of his text. Despite this comprehensiveness and a dash of math, The Information is well within the grasp of a thoughtful general readership.

    Information development and proliferation is examined from two necessary perspectives: mechanical and meaning, the yin and yang of communications. Mechanical covers how information is conveyed including physics governing the origination, transmission, and duplication at the receiving end. For those familiar with Claude Shannon's work, Gleick gives much play to the work of the father of Information theory, including the link with meaning - the recognition that the degree of uncertainty heightens the value of the information.

    It seems to me - and this is the reader speaking not to be confused with Gleick or any of his sources - that when applied to meaning, that understanding how uncertainty affects information can go a long way to explaining how misinformation can be so widely circulated during the information age. On the one hand, many people are uncomfortable with the tsunami of information that defines our time, and they seek out the newest (most uncertain) information that supports the maintenance of their comfort zones. Hence it's possible for organizations such as Fox and its phalanx of seemingly insane commentators to continually replicate information with a high degree of uncertainty that can be perpetuated endlessly and without being devalued. Refuting it only increases misinformation's uncertainty and high value. The same principal obviously applies at least to a degree to many religions, propaganda, and information promoting a point of view or an agenda.

    The chapters delving into meaning, including the fantastic Into the Meme Pool, will have the widest appeal to general readers such as myself. Gleick immediately introduces us to the proposition offered by the Frenchman Jacques Monod that above the biosphere is an "abstract kingdom" of ideas, which are re cognized as replicating, living organisms: "they tend to perpetuate their structure and to breed; they too can fuse, recombine, segregate their content; indeed they too can evolve, and in this evolution selection must surely play an important role." It should be added that information technology itself guides, sometimes controls, but is never absent from that selection process.

    Gleick also gives generous play to the works of Douglas Hofstadter and Richard Dawkins in this adventuresome exploration of organic thoughts.

    When it comes to regarding the flood of information that typifies the Information Age, Gleick offers two defenses against being overwhelmed: search and filter. As someone who makes his living figuratively chopping wood and hauling water in the Information Age, I can't argue with that sparse comfort.

    But my heart soars like a hawk when Gleick invokes Lewis Mumford: "Unfortunately, information retrieving, however swift, is no substitute for discovering by direct personal inspection knowledge whose very existence one had possibly never been aware of, and following it at one's own pace through the further ramification of relevant literature."

    Ultimately, Gleick invokes Marshall McLuhan: "'we have extended our central nervous systems in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned. Rapidly we approach the final phase of the extensions of man - the technological simulation of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society.'"

    Books with thought and insight at their heart are a great reward for me, and The Information is a most rewarding read.
    12 people found this helpful
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  • Reviewed in the United States on April 9, 2011
    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.
    13 people found this helpful
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  • Reviewed in the United States on October 10, 2024
    What a gem! This best-seller is for all of us who have been interested in the art and science of communications...in all its forms, from African drums to quantum entanglement. That covers a lot of ground: anthropology, biology, physics, math, engineering, art, music, literature, and philosophy!

    With some effort, one can dip into each of those disciplines and find relevant stuff with which to explain the evolution of information transfer through the ages. But those chunks of progress are scattered; and - even worse - until Claude Shannon gifted us with Information Theory, we had no way to discuss the properties of information, much less to analyze it.

    If your math chops are really good, you can dig into Shannon's, Hartley's and Nyquist's equations and understand the bits and bauds of Information Theory. Or...you can read this book and have a viscerally satisfying tour, letting the author set you up painlessly for some mind-stretching down the trail. Gleick manages to collect all the scattered concepts and line them up in a logical sequence that's so intriguing you'll want to find the original papers and look at the equations; but this time, you'll be prepared!

    Best of all...it's fun to read!
    3 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

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  • Marcelo Torres Llamas
    5.0 out of 5 stars El mejor libro de los últimos 12 meses
    Reviewed in Mexico on March 22, 2019
    El arco narrativo del libro es cronológico, por lo que nos permite ir entendiendo cómo evolucionó el concepto de información, sus usos, sus detractores, sus promotores. Al ser también un tema inacabado creo que el autor acertadamente va cerrando el libro con sus posibles aplicaciones actuales, a nivel tecnología y biología, y deja la puerta abierta a pensar, escribir o reflexionar sobre el significado, como un acompañante natural de la información.
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  • Mario
    3.0 out of 5 stars Senza infamia e senza lode
    Reviewed in Italy on October 12, 2015
    Le parti interessanti (non tante) vengono approfondite poco, quelle aneddotiche troppo. In complesso molto prolisso, gli stessi contenuti potevano essere espressi in un quarto (se non meno) delle pagine.
  • Jörn Dinkla
    5.0 out of 5 stars Mein Lieblings-Geschichtsbuch
    Reviewed in Germany on January 12, 2015
    James Gleick ist ein wahnsinnig belesener Mensch, der in diesem umfangreichen und lesenswerten Buch die Geschichte der Information und der Informationsverarbeitung darstellt. Äußerst bemerkenswert ist, dass sich der Autor in beiden “Kulturen”, den Geisteswissenschaften und den Naturwissenschaften, sehr gut auskennt.

    Wie der Untertitel des Buches bereits verrät, wird zuerst die Geschichte der Information erläutert. Hier macht der Autor einen großen Bogen von Trommelsprachen und Keilschriften über den Buchdruck, Wörterbücher, Charles Babbage, Telegraphie, Morse-Codes und Telefonie hin zu den heutigen Computern. Es ist äußerst bemerkenswert, was der Autor da alles zusammengetragen hat. Sehr gut gefallen hat mir, das hier auch die physikalischen Grundlagen der Dampfmaschinen bzw. der Elektrizität berücksichtigt werden.

    Später im Buch wird die Entwicklung der modernen Logik, der Informationstheorie und der Wahrscheinlichkeitsrechnung und deren Grundlagen erklärt. Für ein Buch, das sich an die Allgemeinheit richtet, habe ich hier als Informatiker keine Wünsche offen.

    Interessant beschrieben werden auch die Auswirkungen auf die anderen Fächer wie z. B. der Physik oder der Psychologie. Die Diskussionen zur Zeit der Gründung von neuen Fächern, wie z. B. der Kybernetik, der Informatik und der Kognitionswissenschaften sind interessant.

    Schließlich wird abschließend die heutige Situation beschrieben und die Datenflut behandelt. Aber diese Entwicklung ist noch nicht abgeschlossen, denn es wird ja z. B. heute von einem “Internet der Dinge” geredet, das noch mehr Geräte miteinander verbinden soll und noch mehr Informationen verarbeiten soll.

    Es ist bei diesem komplexen Thema sehr schwierig, ein Buch zu schreiben, dass sich an die Allgemeinheit richtet und von allen akzeptiert wird. Es dürfen einerseits nicht zu viele und zu komplexe mathematische Formeln vorkommen, noch dürfen die kulturellen Hintergründe zu ausführlich beleuchtet werden. Ansonsten springt eine der Zielgruppen ab. Ich finde, James Gleick hat hier einen vernünftigen Kompromiss gefunden.

    Fazit: Das Buch ist kein Lehrbuch der Informationstheorie, aber es ist als Geschichtsbuch und Grundlagenbuch sehr lesenswert.
  • MVE
    5.0 out of 5 stars Estupendo libro.
    Reviewed in Spain on November 8, 2018
    Tema trascendental, escrito de forma a la vez rigurosa y muy amena, lleno de humor y erudición no-libresca. Absolutamente recomendable. Una parte importante es muy lenguaje-dependiente. En inglés es estupenda, pero no sé como tolerará la traducción.
  • glenelgamanaplanacanalpanamaglenelg
    5.0 out of 5 stars Thought provoking
    Reviewed in Australia on May 24, 2017
    Need to keep putting it down to think about the implications of what has been written. Enjoyable well written treatment of the state of information theory.