354 pages
English language
Published July 10, 2016 by Vintage.
The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood is a book by science history writer James Gleick, published in March 2011, which covers the genesis of the current information age. It was on The New York Times best-seller list for three weeks following its debut.The Information has also been published in ebook formats by Fourth Estate and Random House, and as an audiobook by Random House Audio.
Found it to be beautifully written, but somehow feels a little overwhelming in both the variety of perspectives, and the depth to which each perspective is explored. It ends up being the titular flood, but not necessarily in a good way.
It’s hard to overstate how excellent this book is. I’ve read a lot of Gleick, starting with Chaos when I was 17 years old. That book was formative for me. It made me want to be a writer, and to learn how to explain complex things beautifully.
I am a professional computer programmer, and so I have a decent background in the material covered by this book. I know Shannon’s work. I’ve read extensively about Turing and Babbage. And I’ve tried (and often failed) to find more to read about Lovelace. But still, even though nothing in this book was entirely unknown to me, I found it endlessly fascinating, and honestly even moving. Gleick is such a master of this kind of work. He pulls you in, fills your mind with ideas, and shows you why it matters.
This is a beautiful, informative, masterfully written book.
The subject matter here is practically designed for me. I love the survey of communications from Baudot through McLuhan. The Hofstadter and Dennett references heighten the sense that this is almost a sequel to [b:Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid|24113|Gödel, Escher, Bach An Eternal Golden Braid|Douglas R. Hofstadter|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1547125681s/24113.jpg|850076], which was very influential for me. Gleick maintains threads (e.g. to "differences" as photo-bits) that help tie the entire work together without relying merely on Shannon.
Yet, somehow, as it progresses towards the end it seems to let go of those threads, and dive into navel gazing about the nature of culture. It could have woven everything together into the modern framing of information as fundamental to the universe, but instead it wandered into concerns about culture. Those might be interesting, but he hadn't done enough research or laid enough conceptual foundation for it to be authentic here.
I can highly …
The subject matter here is practically designed for me. I love the survey of communications from Baudot through McLuhan. The Hofstadter and Dennett references heighten the sense that this is almost a sequel to [b:Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid|24113|Gödel, Escher, Bach An Eternal Golden Braid|Douglas R. Hofstadter|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1547125681s/24113.jpg|850076], which was very influential for me. Gleick maintains threads (e.g. to "differences" as photo-bits) that help tie the entire work together without relying merely on Shannon.
Yet, somehow, as it progresses towards the end it seems to let go of those threads, and dive into navel gazing about the nature of culture. It could have woven everything together into the modern framing of information as fundamental to the universe, but instead it wandered into concerns about culture. Those might be interesting, but he hadn't done enough research or laid enough conceptual foundation for it to be authentic here.
I can highly recommend the first 80% or so, though.
This is a lovely, sweeping history of information theory and technologies. What I love about it is also a point of criticism: Eclecticism is what makes this such a beautiful treatment, moving between mathematics, engineering, physics and genetics. But despite opening with African drumming languages, he increasingly focuses on the genesis of computing out of Europe and the U.S. I think it might also have been more interesting to address the other ways humans attempted to convey information over a distance beyond the first couple of chapters of semaphore, fire signaling, etc.
I enjoyed this a lot, especially the historical parts, but hoped for more details and contrasts between modern notions of information.
Bounces between broad ideas that any generalist will be able to grasp and some specific arguments that require more knowledge of maths than I have. I feel inadequate to judge the overall thesis, but what I loved about The Information is that it's a 'Big Idea' book that often sent me on my own internal tangents. It can be frustrating in the moment to start your own thread when you're supposed to be focused on the author's, but I'd rather have that impulse and have to back-track over the text to pick up the original thread than not to be inspired.
Awesome book. My only quibble is that the final 5 or so chapters bounce around with little connection, and are essentially appendices to the first, excellent ten chapters.
Informative! [rim shot]
Brilliant!
Overall an excellent read. Given that it's an area with which I'm intimately interested, I'm not too surprised that most of it is "review", but I'd highly recommend it to the general public to know more about some of the excellent history, philosophy, and theory which Gleick so nicely summarizes throughout the book. There are one or two references in the back which I'll have to chase down and read and one or two, which after many years, seem like they may be worth a second revisiting after having completed this.
Even for the specialist, Gleick manages to tie together some disparate thoughts to create an excellent whole which makes it a very worthwhile read.
I found towards the last several chapters, Gleick's style becomes much more flowery and less concrete, but most of it is as a result of covering the "humanities" perspective of information as opposed to the …
Overall an excellent read. Given that it's an area with which I'm intimately interested, I'm not too surprised that most of it is "review", but I'd highly recommend it to the general public to know more about some of the excellent history, philosophy, and theory which Gleick so nicely summarizes throughout the book. There are one or two references in the back which I'll have to chase down and read and one or two, which after many years, seem like they may be worth a second revisiting after having completed this.
Even for the specialist, Gleick manages to tie together some disparate thoughts to create an excellent whole which makes it a very worthwhile read.
I found towards the last several chapters, Gleick's style becomes much more flowery and less concrete, but most of it is as a result of covering the "humanities" perspective of information as opposed to the earlier parts of the text which were more specific to history and the scientific theories he covered.
Upon a second reading, this book deserves the 4 star rating I gave it a few years ago. Gleick is an excellent writer, and pulls off an engaging history of Information Theory and it's impact on modern science. Information Theory is like philosophy in the sense that it underlies much of science (physics, chemistry, biology) which represents our formal understanding of the world. And that is not to mention its impact on technology, specifically the digital, which has encompassed our personal and professional lives for the last 60 years. Like philosophy, I feel that I should have learned about information theory much earlier in life. This book goes a long way in filling that gap.
Some interesting history and I enjoyed the perspective on memes, but nothing really mind-blowing.
