The Information

A History, a Theory, a Flood

By: James Gleick

Narrated by: Rob Shapiro

Length: 16 hrs and 37 mins

Publisher's summary

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.

©2011 James Gleick (P)2011 Random House

Critic reviews

"Accessible and engrossing." ( Library Journal)

Nerd Heaven

This is everything that every computer nerd should know. All of the background stories may not be interesting, but you are going to hear them anyway.

Gleicking "The Information"

Gleick

verb, Gleick'd, Gleicking
to synthesize large amounts of information and present in an informative, educational and enjoyable format

to connect theories and ideas across disciplines with historical developments
to write artfully about the intersection between science, history and ideas for a popular audience

Reading James Gleick's masterful new book, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood (Random House), it seems eminently reasonable to propose a new word based on his name.

Gleick's ambitions in The Information are not modest. They are nothing less than a biography of the discipline of information science. Examining, or rather interrogating, the idea of information must have seemed daunting. Where to start, where to end, what to include, what to leave out? This challenge would have stopped most authors, or every other author, before a project like this could commence. In Gleick's hands, the story of information moves from noise to signal, from a subject too big to comprehend to one with a narrative, protagonists, narrative arc, and an unstoppable forward momentum.

From African drumming to Web, Gleick demonstrates how our understanding of what information is has evolved with our material and intellectual cultures. It moves from the early scientists who first defined, quantified and measured information, to the companies that built industrial empires on bits and bytes rather than steel. The Information is a terrific companion to 2010's best work of nonfiction, Tim Wu's The Master Switch. The chapters in both books about the rise of the telegraph and the influence of Bell labs are alone worth the price of admission.

The Information will be one of the top 5 books of 2011. Computer scientists and historians of science will be (or should be) working this book into syllabuses. Invite Gleick to campus, ask him to keynote your conference, give The Information to the humans around you that carry around your favorite brains.

Engaging but with some innacuracies

Any additional comments?

Some of the things in the book about how the Chinese language works seem to be inaccurate. I'm no linguist so all I can do is to refer you to my sources at the end.

- Knowledge about Mandarin does not automatically allow you to read Cantonese even when the symbols are similar.
- He mentions the transition from pictographic to ideographic to logographic but I was left with the idea that Chinese is still ideographic but it is not. Chinese does not work by capturing ideas or meaning.

These inaccuracies are not fatal to the book's intent but I think they should be pointed out nevertheless.

References:

> Writing and Civilization: From Ancient Worlds to Modernity, Episode 5. A logosyllabic Script http://a.co/cWt24dN

> The answer to these questions is no. Chinese characters are a phonetic, not an ideographic, system of writing, as I have attempted to show in the preceding pages. http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/ideographic_myth.html

> The term "ideogram" is often used to describe symbols of writing systems such as Egyptian hieroglyphs, Sumerian cuneiform and Chinese characters. However, these symbols are logograms, representing words or morphemes of a particular language rather than objects or concepts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideogram

Profound and outstanding knowledge

There are only tei books in the last 5 years that help understand whhere we are and where we may be headed: What Technology Wants, and The Information.

must read

Where does The Information rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?

it ranks among the best books I have read through audible or any other source of late.

What did you like best about this story?

James Gliek brings alive a topic that in any other hands could be as dull aas dish water. The way we comprehend the world is an evolving work in progress from the revolution of moveable print to computers and the perception thatthe universe is actually a product of information.
The author's style and presentation makes clear difficult subjects and is understandable ideas for even a ludite like myself . The book is filled with the people that created lut modern society. Be prepared to enjoy, but also to have your mind stretched.

What’s the most interesting tidbit you’ve picked up from this book?

Lord Byron's daughter was actually one of the first computer programs who worked with Babage on the first mechanical computer.

Any additional comments?

The reader is required if he is to get the most out of this book to pay attention as some of it is heavy going.

Too much information in a few chapters.

Some chapters could be simplified. I might still buy the hard copy for my library.

A MUST read: One of the Greatest

I should had read this book 10 years ago. The subject must be understood for everybody on this millennium. The historical recollection is also very good. The importance of the subject in physics, philosophy, economics, sociology is maybe boundless.

Well read accessible history of communication

Glick writes lucidly on a complex subject. He captures the human story of conceiving and developing the technology of communication.

Great book, great narrator

What about Rob Shapiro’s performance did you like?

I listen to a lot of audiobooks, mostly nonfiction. I don't usually post reviews, but I appreciated Rob Shapiros narration so much, I wanted to post something.

A lot of narrators over-dramatize the text. Or the way they read a sentence makes me think they didn't exactly get what the sentence means. Normally I think of narrators as a sort of necessary evil - an extra voice between the author's words and my ears, and I think the best thing a narrator can do is make themselves sort of disappear from the experience, and not get in the way too much.

Rob Shapiro's reading of The Information is the first time I've felt that the narrator actually made the book *better*. His reading was really great - he bring just enough drama to the story, and the way he uses emphasis, changes of speed, etc, made the book more interesting and exciting without feeling distracting. It felt like he had a really great grasp of the text. His reading of this book changed my thinking about how nonfiction books can be narrated.

Another must read.

A networked narrative of the discovery, use, theories, history, and future of humans and information.