The Information
by James Gleick
Summary
Gleick's subject is the concept underneath every other subject: information itself, the history of how humanity learned to store it, move it, measure it, and finally drown in it, told as the title promises in three movements, a history, a theory, a flood.
The history opens in Africa, with the talking drums that transmitted messages across miles by mimicking the tones of speech, redundancy compensating for compression, information theory practised centuries before it was named. Then writing, the alphabet, the dictionary's invention of the word as an object, Babbage's unbuilt engines and Ada Lovelace imagining programs for a machine that did not exist, the telegraph shrinking the planet, and the telephone's accidental conquest.
The theory is the book's centre of gravity: Claude Shannon, the playful Bell Labs engineer who in 1948 defined information as the resolution of uncertainty, gave it a unit, the bit, and proved the theorems that made every network and disc drive possible, one of the least famous of the great scientific revolutions, which this book did much to fix in public memory. Around him: Turing, Gödel, Wiener, and the strange places the concept reached, entropy in physics, the genetic code in biology, Dawkins's memes.
The flood is us: Wikipedia, the exabytes, and the old anxiety, new every century, that there is too much to know.
Around five hundred and forty pages, erudite and quick.
Best for readers who want the biggest idea of the twentieth century given its epic, from the writer who did the same for chaos.
Historical Context & Significance
The Information won the Royal Society Winton prize in 2012 and the PEN/E. O. Wilson award for science writing, and spent weeks on the bestseller lists, a remarkable run for a history of a mathematical concept; Cory Doctorow's verdict, that Gleick is one of the great science writers of all time, was the reviews' general register.
James Gleick had form at exactly this altitude: Chaos, in 1987, had put a whole field into public circulation and coined its vocabulary, and his biographies of Feynman and Newton stand among the best of scientists' lives. This book completed the trilogy of his big subjects and became the standard popular account of Shannon, whose centenary celebrations a few years later leaned on the audience Gleick had built.
The closing chapters' anxieties, filtering, forgetting, the economics of attention, dated in their examples and sharpened in their relevance, and the book keeps being cited at the head of every argument about the flood it named.