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.I’ve been preoccupied lately with thoughts of marauding broomsticks, genies in bottles, and monkey’s paws.Īll are literary images the scientist Norbert Wiener used to make the point that we fool ourselves if we think we have our technologies firmly under control. '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. '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.' - Kirkus Reviews 'Despite the disjointed narrative, this is recommended for general readers interested in the history of information technology and enamored of the information age who wonder what it means to characterize our era as such.' - Library Journal

' The Information is to the nature, history and significance of data what the beach is to sand.' - New York Times Gleick's exceptional history of culture concludes that information is indeed the blood, the fuel, and the vital principle on which our world runs.' - Publishers Weekly The Information is the story of how we got here and where we are heading. And we sometimes feel we are drowning, swept by a deluge of signs and signals, news and images, blogs and tweets.

Citizens of this world become experts willy-nilly: aficionados of bits and bytes. 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.Īnd then the information age arrives. 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. The story of information begins in a time profoundly unlike our own, when every thought and utterance vanishes as soon as it is born. 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 Information by James Gleick