The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick (PDF)

Description

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

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐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.

⭐Our present state of Big Data wonderfully expressed. Everybody should read this. I will my colleagues and students. Thank you Gleick

⭐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.

⭐Here’s a book which examines several aspects of the history of information and communication, beginning with African drums and ending up with Wikipedia. Along the way, the author discusses the work of such pioneers as Charles Babbage (who invented the mechanical computer), Ada Lovelace (who worked with Babbage and is considered the world’s first computer programmer), Samuel Morse (inventor of the single-wire telegraph), and Claude Shannon, who – as the original information theorist – is the real hero of the book. Focussing the story on the personalities is a shrewd touch, as it keeps the tale interesting, even for the non-specialist who might otherwise get bogged down in the technical details of things such as entropy measurement, quantum computing, and the propagation of memes.The other thing that keeps the reader’s attention is Gleick’s entertaining, assured writing style (already familiar to those of us who’ve read his excellent

⭐biography of Richard Feynman

⭐). For example, here is his stimulating comment on a letter from Lovelace to Babbage (p119):”She was programming the machine. She programmed it in her mind, because the machine did not yet exist. The complexities she encountered for the first time became familiar to programmers of the next century.”His description (p231) of the first attempt by Shannon (or indeed anyone) to construct a scale of information content – ranging from the digit wheel in an adding machine (3 bit), through the human genome (estimated conservatively at 100 Mbit), up to the Library of Congress (100 Tbit) – is similarly arresting; the fact that Shannon did this in 1949, just before his book on information theory appeared, and was the first person to suggest that a genome was an information store, is extraordinary.I greatly enjoyed this book. The concepts and technologies it discusses are complicated, but Gleick explains them cleverly, and brings out the excitement in the pursuit of an understanding of the way we use, transmit and keep what we know, and the effect it has on our lives.

⭐I came to this volume with only a vague idea about information and information theory but having been very impressed by Gleick’s book on Chaos (

⭐Chaos: Making a New Science

⭐). This is an engaging work that explores our understanding of information and how it has changed over time. This is primarily done through looking at a number of key thinkers/contributors from the likes of Charles Babbage (1791 – 1871)and Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (1815-1852) to Alan Turing (1912-1954) and Claude Shannon (1916-2001).This is an interesting overview that brings together both the history and theory of information and shows how we came to be living in the “Information Age”. Well worth a read.

⭐Enjoyed reading the book but felt it got a bit bogged down in places and didn’t progress as quickly as it should. Also petered out somewhat towards the end so didn’t feel it was as interesting or detailed a look at information and where next as initially it seemed to promise – early chapters proved more interesting and thought provoking than later ones when I thought it would and should have been the other way around. Still worth a read though all the same…

⭐This is, at it’s core, an excellent book. Chapters 1 to 9 are a party full of old friends from Babbage through to … eh? What’s this?!? DNA, and Oh No! Someone drunk in the corner waffling Just-So stories and old defunct theories? It’s The Dawk!! Skip the rest of chapter 10…. ‘Memes’? OK, skip that chapter…and here’s who we expected to meet at this stage; Chaitin and Kolmogorov having a couple of whiskies. Fine. Gotta be self organising networks next … surely. No? skip skip skip – oh, here’s Duncan, “hi” skip skip skip “any one seen Erdős? couldn’t make it? To short a time and I missed him? oh well.”I’m really sorry. Gleick is a really good writer, does a service to the sciences, was fully on form for most the book – but just spent to much space and, no doubt, time, on the wrong stuff in over a third of the book.

⭐Great book, some other reviews here note that it lags a little bit later in the book, but I thought it held up rather well. Certainly though the earlier part is fantastic, but I thought it continued on fairly well to the rest of it.One of the most enjoyable pop science books I have read in sometime.

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