The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

As someone who has been in computers and information sciences since 1970, this was an amazing and entertaining book. I knew a lot of the history, having lived some of it, but a lot of this was new to me. Very well-researched and presented in a clear and highly readable style. This volume clearly covers the concepts and development of theories of information. It covers both theory and practice and whether you are a beginning computer programmer or an information science theorist, you should find something in here that you didn't know and that will awaken you to some new ideas. If you like this volume, try "Godel, Escher, Bach" by Douglas Hofstadter. That is an eclectic and entertaining mix of mathematics, art, and music philosophy, tying together apparently dissimilar disciplines into a mind-bending tour-de-force.

“Yet the past does come back into focus. “In the beginning was the word” , according to John.’’ How important the ‘word’ or information? “Now even biology has become an information science, a subject of messages, instructions, and code. Genes encapsulate information and enable procedures for reading it in and writing it out. Life spreads by networking. The body itself is an information processor. Memory resides not just in brains but in every cell. No wonder genetics bloomed along with information theory. DNA is the quintessential information molecule, the most advanced message processor at the cellular level—an alphabet and a code, 6 billion bits to form a human being.’’ How significant? “What lies at the heart of every living thing is not a fire, not warm breath, not a ‘spark of life,’ ” declares the evolutionary theorist Richard Dawkins. “It is information, words, instructions.… If you want to understand life, don’t think about vibrant, throbbing gels and oozes, think about information technology.” Dawkins! Is he the only one? “When photons interact, what are they really doing? Exchanging bits, transmitting quantum states, processing information. The laws of physics are the algorithms. Every burning star, every silent nebula, every particle leaving its ghostly trace in a cloud chamber is an information processor. The universe computes its own destiny.’’ Now this takes some thought. Simple example — when heating water, the heat source is signaling the water to move faster (get hot). How? By transmitting energy (?) from source (fire) to receiver (water). What’s really, fundamentally occurring, is transfer of information. Weird. Who agrees? “It is insubstantial, yet as scientists finally come to understand information, they wonder whether it may be primary: more fundamental than matter itself. They suggest that the bit is the irreducible kernel and that information forms the very core of existence. Bridging the physics of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, John Archibald Wheeler, the last surviving collaborator of both Einstein and Bohr, put this manifesto in oracular monosyllables: “It from Bit.” Information gives rise to “every it—every particle, every field of force, even the spacetime continuum itself.” “ This is another way of fathoming the paradox of the observer: that the outcome of an experiment is affected, or even determined, when it is observed. Not only is the observer observing, she is asking questions and making statements that must ultimately be expressed in discrete bits. “What we call reality,” Wheeler wrote coyly, “arises in the last analysis from the posing of yes-no questions.” He added: “All things physical are information-theoretic in origin, and this is a participatory universe.” The whole universe is thus seen as a computer—a cosmic information-processing machine.’’ “Tomorrow,” Wheeler declares, “we will have learned to understand and express all of physics in the language of information.” Another outstanding revelation was Gödel’s discovery . . . “The twenty-four-year-old Gödel believed in the perfection of the bottle that was PM but doubted whether mathematics could truly be contained. This slight young man turned his doubt into a great and horrifying discovery. He found that lurking within PM—and within any consistent system of logic—there must be monsters of a kind hitherto unconceived: statements that can never be proved, and yet can never be disproved. There must be truths , that is, that cannot be proved—and Gödel could prove it.’’ Gleick does outstanding job explaining Gödel’s work. Not easiest idea to absorb. But, overwhelmingly significant. Who understood? “This young mathematician was in the process of moving to the United States, where he would soon and for the rest of his life be called John von Neumann. He understood Gödel’s import at once; it stunned him, but he studied it and was persuaded. No sooner did Gödel’s paper appear than von Neumann was presenting it to the mathematics colloquium at Princeton. Incompleteness was real. It meant that mathematics could never be proved free of self-contradiction. And “the important point,” von Neumann said, “is that this is not a philosophical principle or a plausible intellectual attitude, but the result of a rigorous mathematical proof of an extremely sophisticated kind.” Either you believed in mathematics or you did not.’’ Recalls Pascal . . . ‘Reasons first use is to teach its limits’. Chapter 1 Drums That Talk Chapter 2 The Persistence of the Word Chapter 3. Two Wordbooks Chapter 4. To Throw the Powers of Thought into Wheel-Work Chapter 5. A Nervous System for the Earth Chapter 6. New Wires, New Logic Chapter 7. Information Theory Chapter 8. The Informational Turn Chapter 9. Entropy and Its Demons Chapter 10. Life’s Own Code Chapter 11. Into the Meme Pool Chapter 12. The Sense of Randomness Chapter 13. Information Is Physical Chapter 14. After the Flood Chapter 15. New News Every Day Another intriguing explanation . . . “Schrödinger began with what he called the enigma of biological stability. In notable contrast to a box of gas, with its vagaries of probability and fluctuation, and in seeming disregard of Schrödinger’s own wave mechanics, where uncertainty is the rule, the structures of a living creature exhibit remarkable permanence. They persist, both in the life of the organism and across generations, through heredity. This struck Schrödinger as requiring explanation.’’ Yes . . . it does. “Schrödinger felt that evading the second law for a while, or seeming to, is exactly why a living creature “appears so enigmatic.” The organism’s ability to feign perpetual motion leads so many people to believe in a special, supernatural life force.’’ Life is constantly producing order from disorder, in contrast to every other physical process. Amazing! These slices illustrate Gleick’s style. Presenting serious, complex, obscure ideas, but clearly, respectfully and persuasively. Reader would benefit from some background, nevertheless not a bad work to start acquiring understanding. This important change in modern science, society and philosophy affects everyone. Adjusts everything we thought we knew. Great! This work closer to historical novel then science textbook. I listened to audible version. Well done. Work deserves ten stars! Hundreds of excellent notes with references (linked) Tremendous scholarship! Hundreds and hundreds of references in bibliography Amazing! Detailed index (linked) Eighteen illustrations

There are two milestones that shape the main theses in this book. The first is, naturally, Claude Shannon's formulation of his "Information Theory". Shannon is rightfully the main character of this historical saga (Gleick inserts biographical snippets of him and other main character throughout the book). The second pivotal moment comes with the intrusion of entropy in this theory and in the realization that information, as a physical entity, is also subjected to it. Gleick is a great writer and a pleasure to read. He presents his topic thematically, chronologically, and inserting biographical elements to shape something like an informational saga. He not only engages the reader but also explain difficult concepts in great detail (his presentation of Gödel's incompleteness theorems is an example.) With an intermixture of Entropy and Information Gleick discusses the most important issue from a human perspective: how to extract knowledge and wisdom from a flood of data. It is very interesting to realize that our modern discussion is just a last iteration of searching and filtering. From library indexing, book catalogs, almanacs through our modern Internet algorithms, the problem remains the same: when all information is available, how do you find it and when does it become meaningful? The author is right in using Borges's "The Library of Babel" as the perfect metaphor for it.

The is the first James Gleick work that I have read. I am impressed. He writes cleanly and clearly, with little "fluff" and he seems to understand what he is writing about. It surely took a lot of background work before he was ready to tie so many disparate pieces of history together. I am also impressed in that Mr Gleick seems clearly to want to get the history right and not to push his personal ideas, interpretations, morals, and politics. I am reminded of the James Burke (BBC/PBS) works as he shows how knowledge that at first seems unrelated becomes related thru the work of many men and women scattered in time and geography. This is a history, not a textbook on information theory; there is only a smattering of simple formulae and drawings. The book uses the contributions of Claude Shannon as a thread to tie everyone's work together, but this is not a biography of Claude Shannon. The final chapters are a bit weak in my opinion, especially following such solid work as the preceding chapters. One of the weak (in my opinion) chapters is devoted entirely to Wikipedia. I am enthused with Wikipedia but I don't think it is yet clear what will be a future historian's view of Wikipedia and that it deserves its own full chapter. Overall I found the book to be very enjoyable and educational, adding considerably to my previous knowledge of Mr Shannon's work and bringing me new knowledge of how Mr Shannon's work linked with the work of others to bring us our current "information age."

I wondered what aspect of information Gleick would be treating - knowledge and its communication and storage, the rise of information in physics as a conceptual inverse to entropy and its engagement in black hole theory, or even the information age. My complete satisfaction with Gleick's past work, especially the thoroughness of his notes and his eclectic exposition, compelled me to preorder this book. The Information is all of the above and more. He presents a history, including the fundamentals of language as, for example, employed for millennia by African drummers, then traverses the history of writing (even spelling), difference and analysis engines to the evolution of telegraphs and telephony. The theory then champions the work of Godel, Turing, Shannon, von Neumann and Wiener as information takes on a physical context and leaps into the age of digital logic. Gleick's notes became my list for texts to further read around the topic. Then comes the flood, the rise on the internet, Wiki and the cloud. The Information is a rewarding and enjoyable read and contains many of the charming minutiae that Gleick's research uncovers. As he listed the objectives of Russell and Whitehead's Principia Mathematica and its imminent demolition, Gleick describes the early days of the demolisher, Godel, attending smoky Viennese coffee houses and expounding logic. Highly recommended.

I read Gleick's "Chaos" in the late 1980s in graduate school. It was an awakening, crystalizing many ideas that had been brewing in my mind and revealing clear paths that others had laid out. I use ideas from this book in my teaching and work today, and often refer students to the book. "Chaos" in many ways laid out the capabilities and limitations of deterministic science. I'm still coming to grips with big data, the grist of "The Information," and I figured who better but Gleick to help me through this thicket. He does not disappoint; the book is excellent. Gleick is a master of synthesis of big ideas and their history. He is especially good at weaving together notions from a variety of intellectual traditions: computer science, mathematics, biology, physics, etc. Still, this subject still troubles me as it is less clean and settled as nonlinear dynamics (a subject in which much remains to be learned). Nevertheless, "The Information" is a fine read. It may not inspire me as did "Chaos," but I may need to think about it some more!

One may get a sense, while reading this book, that (at least) the Western has progressed through deeper and deeper layers of information overload, and those who challenged themselves to compress the flow. Some of the most valuable and enlightening, chapters are those written about Lovelace and Babbage, Shannon, Chainin, Turing and others who created the "world brain" that continues to grow today. Only time will tell if the information wranglers have already held onto the original philosophies of those thinkers and tinkerer for too long. Gleick attempts to address this question in the (numbing) chapter on Wikipedia and the final chapter, New News Everyday. The wide-open nature of data flow reflects a time when data was simply analog communication buzzing along copper wires. Yet, today we've become both suppliers and consumers of data, and the overload and raw exposure to data collection seems to imply a need for data encapsulation, if not compartmentalization. There does not seem to be, at present, a 21st century "Claude Shannon" analogue for this problem. So the book remains extremely relevant as a process trace of the attempt to get The Information flowing: reliably, persistently, and rapidly. Understanding this process is essential to understanding our relationship to the information in the information/automation and what we consider "literacy" to be.

Harry Truman once said - 'The only new thing in the world is the old history we do not know'. At several points during James Gleick's magnum opus the same thought captures mind. Am I reading about telegraph? Or is this about twitter? The major essayists were/are complaining that human thoughts are getting constrained by the economy of the message. Is it true that skyscrapers were not as much enabled by progress in other faculties as much by ease of exchanging message (telephone)? Gleick starts by showing how communicating via drums -- as was in some parts of Africa -- could mathematically carry more 'subtlety of meaning' -- and puns - than many verbal languages. He reaches a crescendo in Claude Shannon's Information Theory that is the single thread of the journey in the book. Meanwhile we learn about Ada Lovelace's three step thinking process, Charles Babbage's 'grandeur', Qubits (and why it is like QTips), 'inclusionists' in WikiPedia, what is so special about the number 9814072356 and that the universe has so far done 10^120 "ops" to create roughly 10 ^90 bits of data. This is one book if we hide in one time capsule, humans who find it after 10,000 years may get confused whether it describes the history or..them.

I was hoping for a book on information theory. Instead, I get a book that rambles on and on. The author does his best to constantly yank me out of the story with his poor writing. I actually threw the book away. I didn't want anyone in my family to accidently read it.

Here's an advertisement I want to place on craigslist because of this book: Desperately Seeking: Scintillating conversation partner who is preferably a math, physics, or logic major with strong knowledge of Quantum Physics and Information theory (of today and yesterday)and concepts including, but not limited to, the Babbage/Lovelace Difference Machine, Claude Shannon's math and entropy and cryptology, Turing's machine, logcal paradoxes, Maxwell's demon,The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, Schrodinger's cat, Richard Dawkins' memes, Goding's proofs, Douglas Hofstadter's EVERYTHING. Lack of arrogance and condescension toward someone who almost failed high school math a must. Must be willing to meet in heavily populated public place. * * * * Aside from that, delving into mathematics as James Gleick tells it (algebra, calculus and Boolean logic, mostly ---A watered down version for us math scarred) makes me want to write a letter to every godawful mediocre monotone high school math teacher I ever had (so, all of them) and give them some major hell for not even bothering. Really? Overhead transparencies of meaningless equations and word problems involving trains and lots of bland white kids was all they had? Worksheets and odd numbered problems in a textbook? If I had only known that math is just another way of describing the world, just, ya know, symbolism like Dostoevsky used, but with numbers, and that all that misery and embarrassment and boredom working equations at the blackboard could actually get me closer to the secrets and meaning(s) of life...So, thanks to James Gleick for that too- late realization and doing what the uninspired mathbots should have done years ago. (Are you available for tutoring?) The Information is by no means an easy read, but if you have some previous knowledge of physics(mine came from having read Brian Greene's Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time and the Texture of something or other and a biography of e = mc2 but I suspect a bit of patience and wikipedia would also be just fine), you should be able to get through this without any major confusion. Anybody wanna talk physics and Information theory?

As someone who has been in computers and information sciences since 1970, this was an amazing and entertaining book. I knew a lot of the history, having lived some of it, but a lot of this was new to me. Very well-researched and presented in a clear and highly readable style. This volume clearly covers the concepts and development of theories of information. It covers both theory and practice and whether you are a beginning computer programmer or an information science theorist, you should find something in here that you didn't know and that will awaken you to some new ideas. If you like this volume, try "Godel, Escher, Bach" by Douglas Hofstadter. That is an eclectic and entertaining mix of mathematics, art, and music philosophy, tying together apparently dissimilar disciplines into a mind-bending tour-de-force.

“Yet the past does come back into focus. “In the beginning was the word” , according to John.’’ How important the ‘word’ or information? “Now even biology has become an information science, a subject of messages, instructions, and code. Genes encapsulate information and enable procedures for reading it in and writing it out. Life spreads by networking. The body itself is an information processor. Memory resides not just in brains but in every cell. No wonder genetics bloomed along with information theory. DNA is the quintessential information molecule, the most advanced message processor at the cellular level—an alphabet and a code, 6 billion bits to form a human being.’’ How significant? “What lies at the heart of every living thing is not a fire, not warm breath, not a ‘spark of life,’ ” declares the evolutionary theorist Richard Dawkins. “It is information, words, instructions.… If you want to understand life, don’t think about vibrant, throbbing gels and oozes, think about information technology.” Dawkins! Is he the only one? “When photons interact, what are they really doing? Exchanging bits, transmitting quantum states, processing information. The laws of physics are the algorithms. Every burning star, every silent nebula, every particle leaving its ghostly trace in a cloud chamber is an information processor. The universe computes its own destiny.’’ Now this takes some thought. Simple example — when heating water, the heat source is signaling the water to move faster (get hot). How? By transmitting energy (?) from source (fire) to receiver (water). What’s really, fundamentally occurring, is transfer of information. Weird. Who agrees? “It is insubstantial, yet as scientists finally come to understand information, they wonder whether it may be primary: more fundamental than matter itself. They suggest that the bit is the irreducible kernel and that information forms the very core of existence. Bridging the physics of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, John Archibald Wheeler, the last surviving collaborator of both Einstein and Bohr, put this manifesto in oracular monosyllables: “It from Bit.” Information gives rise to “every it—every particle, every field of force, even the spacetime continuum itself.” “ This is another way of fathoming the paradox of the observer: that the outcome of an experiment is affected, or even determined, when it is observed. Not only is the observer observing, she is asking questions and making statements that must ultimately be expressed in discrete bits. “What we call reality,” Wheeler wrote coyly, “arises in the last analysis from the posing of yes-no questions.” He added: “All things physical are information-theoretic in origin, and this is a participatory universe.” The whole universe is thus seen as a computer—a cosmic information-processing machine.’’ “Tomorrow,” Wheeler declares, “we will have learned to understand and express all of physics in the language of information.” Another outstanding revelation was Gödel’s discovery . . . “The twenty-four-year-old Gödel believed in the perfection of the bottle that was PM but doubted whether mathematics could truly be contained. This slight young man turned his doubt into a great and horrifying discovery. He found that lurking within PM—and within any consistent system of logic—there must be monsters of a kind hitherto unconceived: statements that can never be proved, and yet can never be disproved. There must be truths , that is, that cannot be proved—and Gödel could prove it.’’ Gleick does outstanding job explaining Gödel’s work. Not easiest idea to absorb. But, overwhelmingly significant. Who understood? “This young mathematician was in the process of moving to the United States, where he would soon and for the rest of his life be called John von Neumann. He understood Gödel’s import at once; it stunned him, but he studied it and was persuaded. No sooner did Gödel’s paper appear than von Neumann was presenting it to the mathematics colloquium at Princeton. Incompleteness was real. It meant that mathematics could never be proved free of self-contradiction. And “the important point,” von Neumann said, “is that this is not a philosophical principle or a plausible intellectual attitude, but the result of a rigorous mathematical proof of an extremely sophisticated kind.” Either you believed in mathematics or you did not.’’ Recalls Pascal . . . ‘Reasons first use is to teach its limits’. Chapter 1 Drums That Talk Chapter 2 The Persistence of the Word Chapter 3. Two Wordbooks Chapter 4. To Throw the Powers of Thought into Wheel-Work Chapter 5. A Nervous System for the Earth Chapter 6. New Wires, New Logic Chapter 7. Information Theory Chapter 8. The Informational Turn Chapter 9. Entropy and Its Demons Chapter 10. Life’s Own Code Chapter 11. Into the Meme Pool Chapter 12. The Sense of Randomness Chapter 13. Information Is Physical Chapter 14. After the Flood Chapter 15. New News Every Day Another intriguing explanation . . . “Schrödinger began with what he called the enigma of biological stability. In notable contrast to a box of gas, with its vagaries of probability and fluctuation, and in seeming disregard of Schrödinger’s own wave mechanics, where uncertainty is the rule, the structures of a living creature exhibit remarkable permanence. They persist, both in the life of the organism and across generations, through heredity. This struck Schrödinger as requiring explanation.’’ Yes . . . it does. “Schrödinger felt that evading the second law for a while, or seeming to, is exactly why a living creature “appears so enigmatic.” The organism’s ability to feign perpetual motion leads so many people to believe in a special, supernatural life force.’’ Life is constantly producing order from disorder, in contrast to every other physical process. Amazing! These slices illustrate Gleick’s style. Presenting serious, complex, obscure ideas, but clearly, respectfully and persuasively. Reader would benefit from some background, nevertheless not a bad work to start acquiring understanding. This important change in modern science, society and philosophy affects everyone. Adjusts everything we thought we knew. Great! This work closer to historical novel then science textbook. I listened to audible version. Well done. Work deserves ten stars! Hundreds of excellent notes with references (linked) Tremendous scholarship! Hundreds and hundreds of references in bibliography Amazing! Detailed index (linked) Eighteen illustrations

There are two milestones that shape the main theses in this book. The first is, naturally, Claude Shannon's formulation of his "Information Theory". Shannon is rightfully the main character of this historical saga (Gleick inserts biographical snippets of him and other main character throughout the book). The second pivotal moment comes with the intrusion of entropy in this theory and in the realization that information, as a physical entity, is also subjected to it. Gleick is a great writer and a pleasure to read. He presents his topic thematically, chronologically, and inserting biographical elements to shape something like an informational saga. He not only engages the reader but also explain difficult concepts in great detail (his presentation of Gödel's incompleteness theorems is an example.) With an intermixture of Entropy and Information Gleick discusses the most important issue from a human perspective: how to extract knowledge and wisdom from a flood of data. It is very interesting to realize that our modern discussion is just a last iteration of searching and filtering. From library indexing, book catalogs, almanacs through our modern Internet algorithms, the problem remains the same: when all information is available, how do you find it and when does it become meaningful? The author is right in using Borges's "The Library of Babel" as the perfect metaphor for it.

The is the first James Gleick work that I have read. I am impressed. He writes cleanly and clearly, with little "fluff" and he seems to understand what he is writing about. It surely took a lot of background work before he was ready to tie so many disparate pieces of history together. I am also impressed in that Mr Gleick seems clearly to want to get the history right and not to push his personal ideas, interpretations, morals, and politics. I am reminded of the James Burke (BBC/PBS) works as he shows how knowledge that at first seems unrelated becomes related thru the work of many men and women scattered in time and geography. This is a history, not a textbook on information theory; there is only a smattering of simple formulae and drawings. The book uses the contributions of Claude Shannon as a thread to tie everyone's work together, but this is not a biography of Claude Shannon. The final chapters are a bit weak in my opinion, especially following such solid work as the preceding chapters. One of the weak (in my opinion) chapters is devoted entirely to Wikipedia. I am enthused with Wikipedia but I don't think it is yet clear what will be a future historian's view of Wikipedia and that it deserves its own full chapter. Overall I found the book to be very enjoyable and educational, adding considerably to my previous knowledge of Mr Shannon's work and bringing me new knowledge of how Mr Shannon's work linked with the work of others to bring us our current "information age."

I wondered what aspect of information Gleick would be treating - knowledge and its communication and storage, the rise of information in physics as a conceptual inverse to entropy and its engagement in black hole theory, or even the information age. My complete satisfaction with Gleick's past work, especially the thoroughness of his notes and his eclectic exposition, compelled me to preorder this book. The Information is all of the above and more. He presents a history, including the fundamentals of language as, for example, employed for millennia by African drummers, then traverses the history of writing (even spelling), difference and analysis engines to the evolution of telegraphs and telephony. The theory then champions the work of Godel, Turing, Shannon, von Neumann and Wiener as information takes on a physical context and leaps into the age of digital logic. Gleick's notes became my list for texts to further read around the topic. Then comes the flood, the rise on the internet, Wiki and the cloud. The Information is a rewarding and enjoyable read and contains many of the charming minutiae that Gleick's research uncovers. As he listed the objectives of Russell and Whitehead's Principia Mathematica and its imminent demolition, Gleick describes the early days of the demolisher, Godel, attending smoky Viennese coffee houses and expounding logic. Highly recommended.

I read Gleick's "Chaos" in the late 1980s in graduate school. It was an awakening, crystalizing many ideas that had been brewing in my mind and revealing clear paths that others had laid out. I use ideas from this book in my teaching and work today, and often refer students to the book. "Chaos" in many ways laid out the capabilities and limitations of deterministic science. I'm still coming to grips with big data, the grist of "The Information," and I figured who better but Gleick to help me through this thicket. He does not disappoint; the book is excellent. Gleick is a master of synthesis of big ideas and their history. He is especially good at weaving together notions from a variety of intellectual traditions: computer science, mathematics, biology, physics, etc. Still, this subject still troubles me as it is less clean and settled as nonlinear dynamics (a subject in which much remains to be learned). Nevertheless, "The Information" is a fine read. It may not inspire me as did "Chaos," but I may need to think about it some more!

One may get a sense, while reading this book, that (at least) the Western has progressed through deeper and deeper layers of information overload, and those who challenged themselves to compress the flow. Some of the most valuable and enlightening, chapters are those written about Lovelace and Babbage, Shannon, Chainin, Turing and others who created the "world brain" that continues to grow today. Only time will tell if the information wranglers have already held onto the original philosophies of those thinkers and tinkerer for too long. Gleick attempts to address this question in the (numbing) chapter on Wikipedia and the final chapter, New News Everyday. The wide-open nature of data flow reflects a time when data was simply analog communication buzzing along copper wires. Yet, today we've become both suppliers and consumers of data, and the overload and raw exposure to data collection seems to imply a need for data encapsulation, if not compartmentalization. There does not seem to be, at present, a 21st century "Claude Shannon" analogue for this problem. So the book remains extremely relevant as a process trace of the attempt to get The Information flowing: reliably, persistently, and rapidly. Understanding this process is essential to understanding our relationship to the information in the information/automation and what we consider "literacy" to be.

Harry Truman once said - 'The only new thing in the world is the old history we do not know'. At several points during James Gleick's magnum opus the same thought captures mind. Am I reading about telegraph? Or is this about twitter? The major essayists were/are complaining that human thoughts are getting constrained by the economy of the message. Is it true that skyscrapers were not as much enabled by progress in other faculties as much by ease of exchanging message (telephone)? Gleick starts by showing how communicating via drums -- as was in some parts of Africa -- could mathematically carry more 'subtlety of meaning' -- and puns - than many verbal languages. He reaches a crescendo in Claude Shannon's Information Theory that is the single thread of the journey in the book. Meanwhile we learn about Ada Lovelace's three step thinking process, Charles Babbage's 'grandeur', Qubits (and why it is like QTips), 'inclusionists' in WikiPedia, what is so special about the number 9814072356 and that the universe has so far done 10^120 "ops" to create roughly 10 ^90 bits of data. This is one book if we hide in one time capsule, humans who find it after 10,000 years may get confused whether it describes the history or..them.

I was hoping for a book on information theory. Instead, I get a book that rambles on and on. The author does his best to constantly yank me out of the story with his poor writing. I actually threw the book away. I didn't want anyone in my family to accidently read it.

Here's an advertisement I want to place on craigslist because of this book: Desperately Seeking: Scintillating conversation partner who is preferably a math, physics, or logic major with strong knowledge of Quantum Physics and Information theory (of today and yesterday)and concepts including, but not limited to, the Babbage/Lovelace Difference Machine, Claude Shannon's math and entropy and cryptology, Turing's machine, logcal paradoxes, Maxwell's demon,The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, Schrodinger's cat, Richard Dawkins' memes, Goding's proofs, Douglas Hofstadter's EVERYTHING. Lack of arrogance and condescension toward someone who almost failed high school math a must. Must be willing to meet in heavily populated public place. * * * * Aside from that, delving into mathematics as James Gleick tells it (algebra, calculus and Boolean logic, mostly ---A watered down version for us math scarred) makes me want to write a letter to every godawful mediocre monotone high school math teacher I ever had (so, all of them) and give them some major hell for not even bothering. Really? Overhead transparencies of meaningless equations and word problems involving trains and lots of bland white kids was all they had? Worksheets and odd numbered problems in a textbook? If I had only known that math is just another way of describing the world, just, ya know, symbolism like Dostoevsky used, but with numbers, and that all that misery and embarrassment and boredom working equations at the blackboard could actually get me closer to the secrets and meaning(s) of life...So, thanks to James Gleick for that too- late realization and doing what the uninspired mathbots should have done years ago. (Are you available for tutoring?) The Information is by no means an easy read, but if you have some previous knowledge of physics(mine came from having read Brian Greene's Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time and the Texture of something or other and a biography of e = mc2 but I suspect a bit of patience and wikipedia would also be just fine), you should be able to get through this without any major confusion. Anybody wanna talk physics and Information theory?

This book was hard to get through but only because there was so many incredibly important ideas. I read this months ago and I am still thinking about it. The part I disliked? That there was almost no actual communications research presented. All (or all but a tiny bit) came from engineering or computer science. University communications departments have ceded the entirety of modern communications theory and practice to others. And the worst part is that they don't even care or seem aware of that fact. So... my review of the book? Read it. It is fascinating and one of the most important books to read if you want to get a good, basic overview of the ideas that will shape the next 50 years or more. If you are affiliated with any university department of communications you should be ashamed for a bit and then start fixing the last 50 years of irrelevancy this book clearly has exposed.

Other reviewers have already gone into detail regarding the subject of the book, so I won't belabor that here. The author jumps from talking drums to the telegram to Charles Babbage to transistors, and Gleick is so good at drawing connections between these subjects that it never feels disjointed. It's a really masterful demonstration of how to weave biography, science, and history into one satisfying whole. As a reader with a technical background but no knowledge of the subject, I appreciated the level of rigor in the theoretical sections of the book, although I could see how it might alienate non-techie readers. My advice to them is: read this book anyway, and if it gets too dense, just skip ahead. It's too important, and too well-written, to miss entirely. The book is divided into three sections, and each considers a different question. The "History" section asks: how does the way information is transmitted affect the way we think? One of Gleick's major theses here is that formal logic is a byproduct of written language, and he is very convincing on this point. Another very compelling section was the stuff about early computers, and the story of Babbage and Lady Ada. Gleick has a gift for making scientists relateable, and his enthusiasm for unconventional thinking is contagious. The "Theory" section spells out Shannon's information theory, and brings some much-needed attention to the work of the most influential scientist you've never heard of. As I've said, this part can be a bit technical, which I appreciated, but if that's not your style, you can skim parts of this section without losing the major points. The description of Turing machines was also a highlight. Gleick's exuberant descriptions give the reader a sense of the excitement that the scientists themselves must have felt as they created these deceptively simple, staggeringly powerful theories. Then... the "Flood." I'm a huge fan of Gleick's, but he really dropped the ball on this one. Ostensibly the last section of the book deals with the modern problem of data deluge, but it's a disappointment: there's little research or actual information, and plenty of conflicted hand-wringing. It almost seemed like it had been tacked on by another author. To some extent, this is okay -- data deluge isn't really what this book is meant to be about -- but given how big of a part this section plays in the marketing of the book, I would have preferred that Gleick just left it out entirely and shifted his focus to the book's much stronger sections. The "Flood" section isn't bad, necessarily, just a disappointment compared to the quality and depth of the first two sections. Luckily, it doesn't detract much -- just don't expect more than a cursory look at data deluge from this particular book. All in all, a very strong popular science book (which could just as reasonably be called a history book). If you're a pop science fan, you're probably familiar with some of the ideas and events described here, but only the very rare reader won't have something new and exciting to discover. It's mostly accessible to non-geeks, too; just plan on skimming the occasional section if you're hopelessly math-averse.

If you're expecting another "Chaos" or "Genius," you might not like this book. Partially, Gleick gets into the weeds on quantum mechanics, which is a topic I simply can't grasp. But the main thesis is that information theory has penetrated many areas beyond communications and engineering, which is interesting. What's missing, I think, is the rich history that he typically delivers. This history tends to give excellent context for the subject. I was expecting to hear, for instance, about how the telegraph or the telephone radically transformed the spread of information. By and large, the book merely nodded at those points. I would recommend, however, reading the chapter on African drums. That's worth the price of admission.

I really can't think of a better way to describe James Gleick's The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood than erudite and lyrical. This history of gathering, processing, categorizing, and replicating information is deep in every sense of the word, but so beautifully and clearly written that one gets swept along in it, much like the rivers of numbers and other data Gleick so ably describes. There are innumerable fascinating anecdotes illustrating the lives and careers of men like Charles Babbage, Alan Turing, and Norbert Wiener as well as inventions and developments like the original telegraph system, ENIAC, and Wikipedia. But I found most appealing and astounding Glieck's ability to so beautifully describe the work of these men that even a math-phobic of long standing like me could understand and grasp at least a hint what so fascinated them.

After having spent 12-odd years in Information Technology I was helplessly consumed by the book. I read it during a Christmas break, constantly balancing urges to pick up a Kindle and desires to go out with my wife. Word "information" is wildly used nowadays in all imaginable contexts: "information highway", "information overload", "information economy", etc. Never before I took time to reflect on essence of information, its history and evolution. How did we come to understand information, what were the important milestones and breakthroughs, who were the people at the forefront of the research? Names of Ada Lovelace, Charles Babbage and Alan Turing weren't unknown to me, but I never had a chance to connect them and many others through time and through their works. The book took me on overwhelming historical journey spanning centuries and continents. African tribes, Greek philosophers, Chinese poets, European mathematicians and American inventors all came together to push humanity one step further from stone art of ancient people to the Internet. It's one of the most fascinating books I've read in years.

Definitely not a book for everybody; but for those interested in the subject - information theory - a worthwhile read. I purchased it as a light summer read. It turned to be a bit heavier read that I anticipated, but this was not unwelcome. The early chapters - African drums, Morse code - are lighter read. The middle ones - Claude Shannon & al. - made me think a bit harder but it was worth it.

Having read the original journal articles on Chaos and impressed that Gleick seemed to perhaps have a greater understanding and appreciation of the material than the original authors and more amazingly that he was able to pass that understanding and appreciation on to his readership, I eagerly grabbed his latest book "The Information". I wasn't dissappointed. As were his other books, this book is large. The necessity of this is illustrated in his explanation of the colourful narative used by African tribes to send messages via drums. Missionaries were incredulous of the detail contained in the messages. The colourful narrative offered the context for the interpretation of the possibly ambiguous tonal coded message. Likewise, Gleick's colourful embellishments offer an alternative to a precise mathematical exposition. Perhaps, even more effective at bridging paradigm shifts . The narratives are themselves fascinating excursions into history. When I'm teaching physics I like to put my students in the shoes of those as yet unexposed to a new paradigm. Cleick does this masterfully pointing out how new technologies could receive baffling welcomes. Incredulously, the telephone was often seen as a mere toy. His use of linguistic & cultural (to Gleick the two go hand in hand) analysis makes such oddities seem not merely natual but inevitable. My introduction to Information theory was E.T. Jaynes application of Shannon's lemmas to statistical mechanics at a physics seminar in the mid 60's. We were oblivious to its application to Quantum mechanics nor aware of its relevance to McLuhan's popularization of an information age. Gleick makes clear its relevance to all areas of physics as well as biology, the social sciences, and our everyday lifestyle.

The first half of the book was mostly about the history of information. Kind of got bored, but continued on. The second half the book started off with entropy, and moved into the definition of information. Now that was interesting.

I am reading the book as part of a book Group. We have just finished chapter 4. The book is superb, and has generated much excellent discussion. With the prominence of the author we expected a challenge with a significant learning opportunity. It has lived up to that expectation.

I hadn't read anything by Gleick since "Chaos" was published decades ago. I enjoyed that book; this one, not so much. His prose is festooned with endless bits of trivia and lacks concision. As I forced myself to finish I found myself using the Evelyn Wood speedreading technique I'd leaned as a teen to plow through all the verbiage. I'm glad it's over.

This is an exhaustive and authoritative book about the history of data and information theory. For anyone interested in that topic, it's a must read.

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.

I read this after I read his book on chaos. Similar style and some thematic overlap. But where the other book was very good, this one was OK. It was vast in scope (and hugely researched... The references at the end must be close to 50 pages) but in my humble opinion... It didn't come together as a whole. There are at least 3 separate (independently fascinating) books inside this one (Information - Shannon style; language and communications; information Google - style). But none of the three books feel complete. Worth a read, to be sure. But slightly disappointed in terms of... Not a main course, but a bunch of appetizers.

Terrific, though provoking, mind expanding summary of the evolution of both the framing, storing and theory of information, ranging from the early adoption of the written word to DNA and genetics and naturally to IT, as we now know it. Takes a while to read through, I occasionally had to reread a paragraph several times to understand the inference of a particular point (particularly when it came to Godel, Shannon and information entropy) but it is worth the effort! Well written, but definitely a book to savour and mull about, not something you can skim.

An excellent starting point in understanding (in a generally non mathmatical way) the importance of information theory in modern life and science. Highly recommended.

From the moment people invented writing, information technology has been with us. Encrypting or deciphering language depending on whether we wish to be clear or mysterious is the challenge. Mr. Gleick traces all the revolutions in information creation, gathering, transmitting and receiving. Great reading.

Gleich has a remarkable ability to explain science. Here, he takes on the ambitious task of tying in research from linguistics, theoretical physics, molecular biology and computer science. As other reviewers have mentioned, this book is appropriate for scientists in areas where information theory overlaps. As a history, it has great moments, interspersed IMO by long-winded indulgent sequences that could have been edited down with little loss to the book. In the last quarter of the book, I was stunned to find two glaring, well, errors. Gleich attributes the creation of Wikipedia solely to Jimbo Wales. Perhaps he and his editors have been living under a rock? Larry Sanger co-founded Wikipedia with Wales, and that is a widely known fact despite Wales' attempts to hog all the credit. Furthermore, Gleich attributes "Moore's Law" solely to Gordon Moore, when again, in computer science it is widely recognized that although this rule of thumb got Moore's name, he did not originate the idea. These serious glitches made me wonder how much of the other history, with which I am not as familiar, has similarly glaring biases. It made me doubt the rest of the book. Still, because of its real high points and the difficulty of the attempted fusion of ideas across fields in a useful way, I'll give it a four. Really 3.5, but if I must round, I'll go up because of the difficulty level.

James Gleick is one of our best science writers. The information is a sprawling book covering information theory and many related subjects. I found it a fascinating read and enjoyed the historical anecdotes about the early luminaries of the field. The section on Charles Babbage and Ada Byron was particularly interesting. The period just after WWII saw spectacular advances in this area, including Shannon's information theory, Turing's universal machine, Von Neumann and Morgenstern's work on game theory and Gleick covers it well. I found that the book bogged down somewhat after that. I never believed the concept of memes was useful and Gleick's chapter on it did little to convince me. I also found the last few sections, which try to make sense of meaning as opposed to information unsatisfying. Overall though, an important and readable synthesis of the field for non-specialists.

This is a magnificent book --- you will gain an appreciation of the [necessary] poetry in African drums; learn and grasp the subtleties of gene expression and genetic inheritance; believe in the inevitability of quantum computing [ now that you understand it ]. The gifted individuals that have advanced aspects of human communication are profiled in their complexity --- musings on science, metaphysics, the future; remarkably prescient and insightful. The book leaves us on another frontier -- with our eyes open.

An amazing read for anyone intersted in how the minds of yesterday got us to the information age of today. Not only does it take a biographical approach to many of the scientists involved, but it also gets behind the theories of information in a way most people can read and understand. It's dense, and slow at times, but that slowness is pleasurable, not a detriment to the read at all.

Gleick breaks down great ideas and makes them accessible. For a moment there, I understood quantum mechanics. Other times he exposes the short cuts we have taken in our version of history. Multiple times while reading this book, I felt off balance, my mind blown, and happy at all once. Thank you, Mr. Gleick.

"The Information" is a detailed of every kind of information you can think of. It starts with the drums of Africa, continues with the European semaphore system, the telegraph, Morse Code, Baudot code, telephone and switching, and modern information methods. There is also a section on genetics, DNA, the genetic code and mems. Gleick writes with in easily understandable language. You don't need to be highly technical to enjoy it. I'd recommend this book to anyone interested in information origins and development.

Like anything Gleick writes (Chaos, Genius, Faster...) it is a non-fiction work that is hard to put down yet when you've read it you still want more! This is an EXTREMELY broad and deep subject and its treatment as an ever-accelerating history --from unexpected complexities of African drums, to the subtleties of Morse's and other codes, to the exponentially growing and overwhelming surfeit of ubiquitous information today-- serves as a beautifully well-integrated, lucid and comprehensible foundation for the expertly crafted centerpiece: Claude Shannon's Theory of Information. To tie together the totality of the technology that is most central to the 21st Century with the encoding of the double helix 21 million centuries ago (an approximation, assuming RNA preceded DNA as Life's Secret Decoder Ring for about half of its history,) could take as many volumes as Gibbon's, Wells' or Churchill's histories. Yet with the finesse of the ever-so-clever encoding that lets us put all nine of Ludwig's symphonies in perfect precision on a 100mm-diameter piece of plastic or compress a 1+Gigabit/second 1080i streaming video into the 20 Mbit/s MPEG transport stream on the Internet, Gleick manages to squeeze it all in and make it as much a "page-turner" as any Tom Clancy technothriller. Shannon, the nominal intellectual Ulysses of this multifaceted Odyssey, would have celebrated his 100th on April 30 (2016,) but those in the world of technology impacted by his work (to wit, EVERYTHING) --from Bell Labs, MIT, Boston Museum of Science and the IEEE and ACM technical societies have planned to do it for him at dozens of universities and sites around the world. (And, perhaps, beyond: Voyagers I & II, which have now left the Solar System, directly employ his 1948 "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" to let their electronic whispers "phone home" over eight billion miles, the same mathematics of signals that lets us Skype with a friend in Tibet. In a rare class with Turing and Feynman, according to his widow, Betty, (whom he met at Bell Labs a half century before,) had Alzheimer's not robbed him of his genius by the arrival of the new millennium he did so much to create, "He would have been bemused" by all this Magick, (i.e., "sufficiently advanced technology.") From the Bells Labs and "Brass Rat" old-timers I've spoken with who knew him, I believe this one quiet man who wrote TWO PhD theses at MIT in 1940 --"A symbolic analysis of relay and switching circuits" and "An Algebra for Theoretical Genetics"-- would been bemused by AND have loved that this book that fully lives up to its subtitle: "The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood..."

From African drumming to qubits and beyond, Gleick (almost) puts it all together. He addresses the mess Claude Shannon made for us regular people by divorcing information from meaning. Shannon's information is "surprise value". Anything repeated-redundant- is dispensable. 50% of English characters can be deleted, and the meaning of message still gets through. Hence algorithms, as a result of which music can be data-compressed without losing information. But, there is no meaning without some redundancy - letters and meanings do not change every instant. Shannon equates information with entropy - but common-sensically, entropy means the loss of information. Gleick tries to put meaning and information back together, but dealing with quantum computing, based on the idea that information cannot be lost, we find the claim that in theory, any book can be reassembled from its ashes -- as though the energy it would take to gather all the ashes and turn time backwards was merely an inconvenience. So, prepare to enjoy a hike through the history of science, but somehow I think Susskind, Hawkings et al have yet to make clear what they are talking about -- even to Gleick. From the book: "On the contrary, it seemed that most logical operations have no entropy cost at all. When a bit flips from zero to one, or vice-versa, the information is preserved. The process is reversible. Entropy is unchanged; no heat needs to be dissipated. Only an irreversible operation, he argued, increases entropy." (Kindle Locations 6479-6482). Please explain how information is preserved if the process is reversible. Does not reversible mean it can be wiped out? Oh, I know that increasing entropy means information loss -- but I wish Gleick took Ilya Prigogine into account - Prigogine makes the case that entropy is absolutely irreversible. I loved learning that Ada Byron, daughter of the beloved Lord, was the first computer programmer. She might have out-Einsteined Albert had she not died young of cancer. What a movie that would make!

Wide-ranging survey of the field with interesting anecdotes about the people (many of whom I knew about only tangentially) who contributed along the way.

James Gleick's "The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood," is an excellent read. Claude Shannon, whom many may recognize as the "founder" of information theory, plays a central role in Gleick's book; indeed, for purposes of this book, Shannon serves as the principal "linking mechanism" that connects most of the content of the book. Many of the other reviewers have articulated well the rich material in this book, and there isn't much I could add to what has already been stated. If you are fascinated by the idea of "Information," then you will enjoy this book.

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.

Especially found that the earlier threads were fascinating. Origins of information science (about bits & abstract algorithms) were new for me. A little dry over time and less interesting as we reach the present.

A book at a generally college aged reader. The lives of the “the bit” was carried from Athens to today. Well done.

Gleick's survey is obviously important and needed as it becomes increasingly obvious that information is the real currency of the global economy (viz. a recent article in the NY Times, "Mining of Raw Data May Bring New Productivity") . He does a good job of introducing basic concepts of information theory such as Shannon entropy. However the "information density", if you will, of the book is uneven: some chapters, such as those concerning Shannon, Turing and Kolmogorov, are very substantial and provide useful introduction to key concepts of contemporary information and computing; other chapters, such as those dealing with "memes" and information glut, come off as lightweight and vague. Why discuss memes instead of the theoretical but still tantalizing implications of the holographic principle, the idea that the universe physically IS information, which follow from Gleick's all-too-cursory discussion of black hole thermodynamics? Why repeat the same tired discussion of the societal implications of information glut, instead of covering the increasing importance of Bayesian statistics - the science of constructing quantitative predictions based on prior information? E.T. Jaynes' "The Logic of Science," for example, demonstrates the extreme relevance of Shannon's information theory for analytic prediction yet does not get so much as a nod. These are areas in which Gleick's book, good as it is, still leaves the reader unsatisfied.

A fascinating, mind-bending book.Reminds me of "Decoding the Universe." May take a little patience to read unless you are into that sort of thing.

Wasn’t as sharp a view of current information their as I’d hoped, but a great overview of the progress we’ve made in handling and using information.

It had been a very long time since a book had really stirred my interest and given me my own new ideas about information technology. As a long-time inhabitant of the IT world, I can get kind of complacent and actually fool myself into thinking that I've really processed everything I know about information technology. But this book showed me that was not the case, and got me thinking about all kinds of new ways to look at what I thought I already knew...know what I mean?

Interesting background on how information has been handle throughout history. Personally, I love this type of stuff. I am an engineer that learned a lot of this material in an academic setting. This book's presentation was a lot more fun to read.

Written with zest and dense with information comes another knowledge enhancing book from James Gleick. I do not, however, agree that information is more basic than energy and matter. Information is what a thinking mind makes of its forays into the universe. Tree, forest, sound...

Excellent book. Well written and the story pace is perfect. The only thing that I miss is a better description of the sources of many of the information provided. In this regard, a book like "Dark Hero of the Information Age: In search of Norbert Wiener, the father of Cybernetics" is more complete. This is specially important in the events described around Claude Shannon and his time with Vannevar Bush. Wiener also played an important role in the theoretical developments of that time. "The information: ...", though filled with references, it doesn't point to them precisely in the text. Also, the characters chosen for the main roles are rather US-centered. Participation of scientist that weren't in the US during the time are relegated to a second plane (e.g. Konrad Zuse). Nevertheless an excellent book for those trying to understand the history of information theory.

Gleick writes with deep knowledge, thematic resonances, and easily digestible language. Philosophically and mathematically (very high-level) engaging. What a treat!

This book is really educational. I am a software guy and learned a lot. It is easy to read.

I had been researching Claude Shannon's Theory of Information in 2010, seeking to establish a link between his ideas of communication as a mathematical theory and the way we communicate with each other today. This book is GREAT research material about these and other issues related to the history of Information, and it is also very entertaining. I wish they would have edited it a year earlier!

Great book with a startling new perspective on consciousness and sentience. Breaks free from the creature centric view which has pervaded throught since neolithic beings first developed philosophy. Proposes an new epistomology of hierarchical ontological intention in our universe. We have never been alone...

Perhaps the author was trying to convey some of his points via his writing? Such as; Not all information carries meaning, or some information is redundant. There were many interesting topics in the book but the constant intermixing of excerpts and quotations from his subjects, I found, made it seem "jumbled."

Good

very interesting to read so much about a simple thing like information ( at least to me it was simple till i read this book!). a lot of information is given starting right from the stone age till now. but after some time the reading become repetitious and heavy.

A historical/philosophical approach to how our information age developed and the theories behind data, its' encoding, and crypto. This really should be a part of every technical person's professional development. It really opens up your mind to alot of ideas that are at the roots of your disciplines.

What is information? Knowledge theorists such as myself use the "wicked" acronym (actually WKID) to provide a clue: Wisdom > Knowledge > Information > Data. Data are generally defined as "bare facts." By the time we get to information we have a collection of organized data or taxonomy. Knowledge is information employed for a purpose; this is the level of understanding that defines a discipline, e.g., psychology, engineering, etc. Wisdom is knowledge plus some moral or normative component: knowledge will tell you how to make a bomb, wisdom will tell you if you should. It is at the level of wisdom that paradigms and worldviews operate and compete: e.g., environmentalism, theism, materialism, etc. -- all make normative claims regarding to what effect we should employ knowledge. Even so, the WKID categories are to some extent points of convenience along a continuum; the dividing line is often less obvious than advertised. Into the fray jumps Gleick. Beginning with African drums, moving to Shannon's information theory, and ending at the modern flood of continual information, Gleick attempts to provide perspective on "the information" (an element so foundational to human existence that the author decided to introduce the subject with the definite article). With an interesting prologue and provocative epilogue, the work is organized into 15 chapters and 526 pages, of which nearly 100 comprise end notes and an index. Although the book is not formally divided into parts, it is roughly divided into three sequential themes: forms of communication, Chapters 1 - 5 (a history); the theory of information, Chapters 6 - 9 (a theory); and the sources of information, Chapters 10 - 15 (a flood). The first five chapters survey language in its various forms, first oral then written; I found them riveting. The next four chapters begin the dive into formal communication theory. They reveal the remarkable result that digital codes (as opposed to analog transmissions) can be made arbitrarily accurate even over noisy channels. In fact, the most accurate, condensed, and efficient digital code known to man happens to be the genetic code -- so, information is foundational to humanness in more ways than one -- and it gets its own chapter (10). If the book had ended with Chapter 10, it would have remained a very good book, if not incomplete. But the author earns extra points for soldiering on. Because in fact, Chapter 10 sets up an implicit tension: what has generated all that information? At the time of the mid-nineteenth century, the answer was well known: all known information sources were sentient. Had DNA's digital code been discovered then, rather than 100 years later, the verdict would have likely remained unanimous, and the question would not have been "What..." but "Who..." with God declared Author; Shannon's information theoretic would have only cemented the view: the unparalleled informational carrying capacity of DNA, its digital nature in a pre-digital world, its remarkable error correction routines... But that is not how history went, and it is not what Gleick believes, nor how he chose to end his book. He does not shy away from attempting to answer the questions his subject demands. Four chapters are devoted to memes, randomness, quantum mechanics, and other non-sentient explanations for the origin of biological information. (This is something I have studied at some length. I generally find non-sentient explanations of biological information incoherent, and I say that is the case here; I am apparently a century out of time.) Notwithstanding, the writing is very good, and in places, spellbinding. His investigation is fearless and authentic. Gleick is committed to follow his subject to its end, and I cannot help but to recommend this book.

I read this book soon after Charles Seife's

Some critics have wished, quite correctly, that Gleick had examined the economic importance of information more deeply. However it's a masterpiece to be read carefully

Since this was a required reading for my English class at University, I had generalized expectations. I thought it was just another boring book about language. I could not be more wrong. Gleick gives so much historical background on every technical subject he introduces that reading becomes a joy, as you learn about the history of computing and other modern technologies revolved around information.

Gleick take us on a linear path through the history of data, data processing and technology leaps. Book is an easy read, generally keeps moving and is always interesting. Gleick's The Information should be required reading for anyone in the Internet business, media, or business these days.

Other books explore similar subjects but in more detail. I guess good enough for someone just getting into the subject

I learned a few nuances from this book but it was laborious in arcane details that did not to be included. Looked like a "name-dropping" exercise.

In the first chapters, Gleick talks longer about the historical origins of the logics. The ancient people learned their language in typical sitiìuations of the life. In the 1700-1800 it starts the Industrial Revolution with a particular form of tecnology, that step-by-step becomes always more important. The first computers, those had an exit very slowly, are early substituded by the modern computers. This fact follows by a research very strong, particullarly by the works of Shannon, von Neumann,Wiener. Gleick moves himself in this back-ground in an intelligent way: he talks with competence about the matematical theory and the phylosophical aspects. It is important for the actual research also the relation between logics and biology, what that is named "complexity theory".

This book is a must-read for anyone interested in computer science, math, information theory, machine learning or the history of mankind in general. Great writing. Ada Lovelace is a G

As a history the book is superb. It documents the flood of data in a quantifiable manner. As a theory it vacillates between information without meaning and information with meaning. This problem was created when Shannon's paper on communication theory was referred to as information theory. This confusion is avoided if it is clearly understood that Shannon's work applies only to the symbol patterns in a communication channel. The encoding table, created by human intellect, creates the pattern carried by the symbols. Shanon enters at this point and puts a scientific and engineering foundation under the design of the communication channel which moves the code pattern from sender to receiver. in my opinion there is no information in this pattern until it is processed by the receivers decode table. This may be in the form of a symbol driven machine where the decode table is designed into the machine by the intellect of the engineers doing the design or if the symbolic pattern is to be decoded by a human being, then typically the decode table converts the pattern to the launguage of the receiver. Reliable communication occurs perfectly only if the sender and the receiver have exacly the same definition for each and every word. The book would have been easier to follow if the assignment of meaning,for which there is no physics, was carefully seperated from the transfer of symbols in a communication channel for which there is physics and engineering principles which Claude Shannon masterfully docummented. This reality is lost because of the familuarity and confidence we each have in the use of the language we were raised with.

Aimed at the intelligent lay reader. The chapter about talking drums was particularly interesting. The book ranges more broadly afield and was less technical than I expected. An interesting, well-organized read. I wish it had footnotes instead of endnotes. Extensive bibliography.

This book is dense with science but is a joy to read. It's amazing how all of the electronics in our lives are the product of a field that is still very young!

I have just begun to read it but already I am entranced. It presents an important viewpoint on the nature of information and human communication.

This is a useful, informative book. Gleick is better with the physical sciences and Shannon's fundamentally useful but semantically barren work on information. Gleick's treatment of how cognitive science arose and who did what and when is superficial and somewhat misleading. Gleick needs to read some Newell and Simon; George Miller was an important figure but surely not the most important figure in creating the new field.

A really excellent book on the evolution of information technology!

Skillful description of the arc of information history, with many charming first hand quotes. Engaging prose especially toward the end.

A great read by the best explainer around. Something I never knew on every page.

I learned a lot of new facts through reading this book and it was an enjoyable experience. I did need to have a lighter read in between chapters like water between wine sips. It's the kind of book worthy of passing on to friends.

Not that I would ever torrent a book, but if I had, I would finish reading the book and then immediately go to Amazon so that I could buy it and leave a review just to show my appreciation to the author. Yeah, it's that good. Love the story of and quote from Charles Babbage who was asked about his plans for a calculator-type machine, by parliament members, "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" He replied, " I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."

A unique take on an interesting topic. Learn the history of information and the history of how we think about information. Learn about Dictionaries, African tribal drums, memes, pre-electric telegraphs, phones, internet, bits, dot, dashes, letters, and so much more.

I actually listened to this book on audio CD while driving to/from work everyday. The book was so fantastic that I wanted to buy it and review it more deeply. This book is not for someone with ADHD. It's pure and true information about information. Very interesting concepts.

A wonderful book from James Glieck covering a broad spectrum of methods by which info has been handled.

This book is very informative.

One of the most interesting historical accounts and description of data and information evolution published in recent years. Having worked in research and innovation fields for the past 20 years I felt its comprehensiveness lacked in providing a rough path on how we are all envisioning information’s use and it's future. That would have been a great last chapter. That is the reason for my 4.5 rating.

Ever wonder how we went from needing to be in person to communicate to texting? That and a million other questions you didn't know you had are answered in the first few chapters. Here and there the math examples or logic examples were over my head, but it didn't matter because they were just examples and the biographies and narrative and explanations of the key influences kept me riveted.

I had problems with some chapters. A little too much math for me. But I enjoyed reading it, nonetheless. It was interesting how the book is structured, almost chronological, giving the idea that information, like any human thing, has evolved.

Whether your career included the evolution of computers, math or information studies you will find this description of the development of those fields as known today worth reading. Everyone will find small portions they don't care about to drag a bit but that discontent doesn't last long.

This is a challenging concept; that the universe is based upon information rather than matter. Immediately, one should think of Genesis 1 where it is recorded that God "spoke" the world into existence, which is an interlocutory step, as well as John 1:1: "In the beginning was the Word...and the word was God" According to the author, the spoken word is a transitory step between matter and information; but it's a start is the understanding process. Whether the universe is based upon information is not a certainty, but it is an interesting and provacative thought that deserves time and attention.

A terrific pulling together of an intellectual history, happening in disparate threads but ultimately coming together in this book. This is the kind of book that I can honestly say, you will never see the world the same way again after reading it.

Excelent! a bounty of well organized data, information, knowledge and wisdom. A treasure for the scholar teaching the subject and for the student looking for a raft to navigate an ever increasing sea of, well... information.

Insanely deep dive into something much taken for granted! Love this (and all of his books) book.

Great book for nerds. Covers all aspects of "information" but especially information theory from Claude Shannon. Highly recommended! I definitely enjoyed it.

Very pleased with book. It traces our information processes from drums of Africa to present day digital technology. Anyone interested in this subject will certainly enjoy the book. Prompt delivery and in very good condition.

So amazed at the wide ranging topics that can be touched by this subject. Learned lots that I didn't know and I have been following the field for years.

I like the history, starting with oral cultures, through the invention of writing, and ending with Claude Shannon's mathematical treatment and the age of the Internet.

One of my favorite books I've read in my life that really has some profound and thought provoking ideas about the changing way information flows in our world.

good book

Great recounting of the differences between literate and oral societies and what that means for our next big phase.

Made a good gift.

Although i studied this in engineering i never had the benefit of so much insights and historical background and anecdotes.

Clearly, this was a labor of love by Gleick. He is a great writer, so the book is eminently readable.

Excellent like all of Gleick's books.

I had mixed emotions going into this book. Being only a sophomore in high school, I feared this book would be beyond my capacity. While very intellectual and thought-provoking, this book still offers a lot to a kid like me. I thoroughly enjoy the factual stories he tells while still taking out the main points effortlessly. It's a great read and I strongly recommend it, but be warned that the vocabulary does get to be a bit on the outer-edge of the word usage circle.

Complex, exciting material cogently put forward. Even when I couldn't follow the math, it was difficult to put down the book. I have recommended it to all of my friends.

This is the most stimulating read I've had in a decade. It's difficult, but worth the trouble. All credit to Gleick.

Written for a popular audience, sometimes difficult to follow but written in an easy style that kept me reading through the difficult patches. A fairly thorough review of the history of the field.

A great listen - several times over. Found the book a tough read, but the audio version made it much more enjoyable.

This book was full of great information about the history of information processing, but was a bit dry at times.

Another in depth coverage, well worth the thought-provoking time to read.

excellent!

I would like to recommend this book by James Gleick - which I just read on my iPad. You might recall that in the 80s Gleick wrote the `Chaos' that laid out Complexity Theory to popular audiences. Words like Strange Attractor, Butterfly Effect, Fractals and Mandelbrot joined the popular culture. It was such a sensation that folks created music and paintings of complexity theory images! He also wrote a book on Richard Feynman titled `Genius' and another one on Isaac Newton - both terrific reads. This new book, "The Information," is an excellent read. He introduces us to Claude Shannon, the father of information theory - whose master's thesis at MIT is considered by professionals as the `single most significant work in the 20th century' - a century that included Einstein! Claude Shannon was raised in Gaylord, MI and went to U. of M. The book shows how Claude Shannon precisely defines the word `information', just like Newton precisely defined the words Mass, Time and Force. The fruits of the digital revolution that we enjoy today can be traced directly back to Claude Shannon's seminal work at the Bell Labs. There is a brief YouTube video produced by U.C. Television on Claude Shannon that is worth a watch. The eminent Physicist Wheeler spent time with Claude Shannon at Princeton, and was impressed with him. Towards the end of his life, acknowledging Shannon's work, Wheeler says, "It is bit.' Meaning that the world (it) that Physicists are trying to describe is really `bit' (information). Which is in a way is a strange echo of an old saying in Sanskrit from India - `You are It.' This phrase meaning that there is no difference between the individual and nature. So I put these two statements together to derive the following corollary - You are a Bit (!) - meaning we are all pieces of information! :-) Gleick however points out a potentially troubling consequence to Shannon's work. What Shannon did was to explicitly separate meaning from data. Thus the digital revolution is efficient, mechanized and far reaching. However it seems that the task of 21st century leadership is to forcefully connect meaning back to data. As far as the overall book is concerned, it would be a disservice to say it is a book about Claude Shannon. I would suggest that the author uses Claude Shannon as a narrative device around which to spin this fascinating tale. Indeed he goes farther back than Plato and Socrates in History and as far away as African Tribal drummers through to Charles Babbage and Alan Turing. He traces the digital revolution past its seminal inception at the Bell Labs and carries out forward to the flood we are experiencing today. And leaves us at the precipice of a new world wondering what new turns await us next. I feel like not just crediting Gleick for this well written book, but celebrate a writer who can maintain such a high standard of science writing for over thirty years.

excellent stories: information's power to organize chaos. #haikubookreview #amazon #audible That's 10 words, and Amazon needs 20. Wait. Problem solved!

great transaction

Gleich always delivers, as he did in his great bio, Genius. Learning can be fun. Refreshingly upbeat on the future.

Great writing and very informative. Amazing facts and anecdotes. I recommend this book to anybody interested in technology and or History.

This book just made me want to go back to graduate school and learn all of the fundamentals of communications and information theory.

The book surveys the world of information theory and presents an excellent overview. It is aimed at non-experts, but even those who know Shannon's theory will find this book interesting and useful. It's also a resource for those teaching courses in the subject.

comprehensive, informative, background a bit more than necessary, thought provoking, mathematics interesting but not overwhelming, minimum predictions, glad I read this book

The shear scope of the topic and the breadth of the material covered is daunting, yet Gleick manages to bring everything together into compelling narrative that made all 544 pages worth it. From African drumming, to dictionaries, to computers, everything is included.

Information theory all the way back to Morse. More readable that my engineering texts. This would have been a nice background read for engineering school.

I found this book well-written. It was interesting, stimulating and educational. I would not recommend it to the general public, but would to anyone with some science background. I have a degree in physics (from half a century ago and never practiced), but am a generalist, and some very few parts were a little beyond me. But overall, I very much enjoyed the read.

It left me wanting more. This book peaked during its discussion of information theory only to rapidly became unfocused in the final chapters. There are so many great ideas that are rushed by. It really feels like he didn't know how to finish the book. Great read all the same.

Interesting history, would have liked an appendix with more technical details

Eye-opening journey through the history of accelerated information access. Great way to conceptualize information as part of the thermodynamic entity and to start looking at Google semantic search in context..

I think The Information is a wonderful read on something as fundamental to our universe as gravity. My only complaint is that the Kindle version's footnotes are messed up and some appear randomly at the end of each chapter.

Coming from a computer science and *informatics background, I absolutely loved this book. The author wrote a fascinating history and an decent laymen's description of information theory.

Great story, and I saw that this is one of Mark Zuckerberg's "liked" books, so when you see THAT, how CAN you not look into this book. This is a little bit more of a wide view of information exchange though. For example one of the first examples of information exchange is people playing drums to one another, which is not really that close to the Robert Noyce and the integrated circuit.

Te most brilliant book on the subject there is He makes Claud Shannon central to the Digital revolution.which Shannon was.

This is excellent book. It is a complex analysis of how we have processed information in western society. I recommend it to others that are not afraid of complex analysis of complex issues

This is a fine book full of interesting information about the concept of information and the various ways in which it has been approached. Gleick writes very clearly about rather complicated things.

The breadth of coverage of an seemingly unbounded topic was amazing. I was learning new things in every chapter. Heavy going at times, but well worth the effort.

I never realized how inventions shape the way people think. This is incredible and amazing! I would recommend this book to anyone.

Very informative collections of the evolvement of information.

All I can say is I'm a particularly intelligent person and an avid reader, but this is just one of those books that, no matter how much I *want* to read it, it doesn't seem likely to happen. It's too dense. But I do feel cooler/smarter having it sitting on my shelf.

This is an outstanding look at both the history and the cultural significance of information. I purchased the Audible and the Kindle versions and after listening to sections in the car, I frequently found myself reviewing them in the Kindle app for further edification. I have a background in communications technology so I was pretty sure that I would like the book but it exceeded my expectations. James Gleick is not only a researcher par excellence but also a captivating storyteller. Upon completing The Information I listened to his excellent earlier book, Chaos. Both Audible versions are read by the very capable Rob Shapiro.

It is a well-written, informative and enjoyable book. I found it so valuable that, even though I already had an audible version, I decided I wanted a readable version as well.

From little pointy-eared Irishman Claude Shannon to the multi-dazzling Information Technology of today, it's already been a thrilling ride. My first acquaintance with this was 60 years ago and I'm still not over it. And it's not slowing down, it's speeding up, as we all know. We still struggle to define it. Many theorize about Information. Where are we on this ride? Nowhere near the end. Please fasten your seat belt. BTW: Amazon made me a nice deal when I bought two copies.

I did a very good job of explaining the role of language in basic technical and philosophical questions. The part about communication by drums used by primative people was especially interesting.

This book is a good story about the informaipn. I discovered a new personajes and a relations about stidies. Great book

Things are moving faster,than the time when I was small,thefacts this book diclosed taught me a lot,at times it is long winded, but in a few months I will redead it.It is surpriseing how we take today for granted read it and then:-)

Not through the bood yet but so far it is all I hoped. I'm a fan of JG, having read Chaos and Faster. That's enough information for now.

Not clear whether this book has a "theme" or what the main point is (other than we are flooded with information), but as a Professor of New Media, I learned quite a bit about facts and events in the history of other new media technologies. Written well -- but mainly for readers in the general field.

However, sometimes tries to say too much. Gleick is nothing if not a clear, fine, imaginative writer, able to explain, or at least almost explain, the unexplainable.

This book means, I think, to be a sophisticated introduction to information theory for general readers with no particular background in math or computer science. I suppose it fulfils its task. But it's incredibly verbose and somewhat arbitrary in how much time it spends with each of its topics. It's not a book you "can't put down." Rather, if you don't put it down after a few pages, I suspect you won't ever finish.

A serious disappointment - Chaos changed my life - and was actually about the history, development, and basis of chaos theory! This book does nothing of the sort for information theory. More like a history of human communication than a book on information theory.

The receiver was very happy to have it, but I myself have not read the book. Maybe when he's done with it.

Gleick is à rare genius. I don' t understand how someone can be so brillant. I'm continually in awe of him.

the cover is not attracting

Great gift!

All the other positive reviews cover the content but before buying the kindle version consider -- 40% of the book is notes and there isn't a good way to move back and forth between text and notes. So you can read the book and then read the notes without knowing what they referred to. I would recommend buying it on paper.

Comprehensive and interesting. The future is here

I expected this to be full of "information," and it didn't disappoint. I didn't expect it to be beautifully written. It was. Wonderful.

to be short: informational. It was a enjoyable front to back. probably a stronger first halve. and word limits suck :)

I didn't know the book has a restoration I thought it'd come with its original hardcover

Excellent book. I loved Choas and Genius as well, and will likely read Gleick's NEWTON book next. This book also goes very well with Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver novel - since both can be read simultaneously and cover the same subjects from different perspectives. It seems obvious that Gleick is a fan of Quicksilver too. The overlapping references are frequent.

I liked James Gleick's biografy on Richard Feynman very much. But "The Information" I cannot read after the first few chapters. An endless data stream of facts.

Interesting but for me perhaps too long . I found it very difficult to follow the tabulations and plans on the Kindle

The book covers most of the important phases of communications and technical mile stones. Easy to read in spurts or long duration.

Being myself a former Bell employee I bought "The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood" as soon as I read the review in "The New York Times". Began with the greatest interest, I quickly became dismayed when after a brief prologue on-focus, James Gleick goes to visit the language of African drums, not that the subject is uninteresting, but not during 20 pages. In the same chapter, he jumps suddenly to "Samuel Morse struggling with his own percussive code, the electromagnetic drumbeat designed to pulse along the telegraph wire." And thereafter another chapter on the birth of cuneiforms in Sumer, the cultural discontinuity brought by writing in ancient oral civilizations and the reluctance shown by Plato vis-a-vis the written text. Isn't it enough? Comes a long digression on the invention of the first English dictionary in 1613 by an obscure priest under the title "A Table Alphabeticall, conteyning and teaching the true writing, and understanding of hard usuall English wordes". Interesting? Maybe, but what is the connection with the Information Theory? Again, all these developments are intrinsically interesting and by times even fascinating (like the section on Babbage and Ada de Lovelace), but they dilute our interest and soon we loose track of the theme of the book which was supposed to be the information theory. When Gleick finally tackles his subject, we are already at chapter 7, and of course he speaks about the encounter of Claude Shannon with Alan Turing. We learn much more on the beauty of Turing's decyphering than about Shannon's Information theory. And Gleick goes on and on for another 8 chapters musing about Maxwell's demon and entropy... Gleick is his worse enemy. He is an erudite and it shows! But he does not know how to follow a demonstration order. Logic is not his forte. He needs a good editor.

If the topic of the book interests you, check out the following related books 1) Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages by Alex Wright 2) The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century's On-line Pioneers by Tom Standage 3) The New Media Reader by Noah Wardrip-Fruin

The book is titled "The Information" as an acknowledgement that information is an all-important concept in today's world. Unfortunately, it is also all-encompassing and used by different people to mean somewhat related, but different things. I was expecting the book to explain, if not what information *is* (there is no real agreement on that yet), at least some insights into its nature. Instead, we are given some (very nice) stories about researchers (from Morse to Shannon). Very well written, very entertaining, but anecdotal in nature, and very incomplete: there is way more to the concept of information that Shannon's theory (Shannon himself was the first one to make clear that he had limited his theory to some aspects of information encoding and transmission. In fact, he thought that "Information Theory" was a misnomer, and indeed it is). The book does offer some insight into Shannon's theory and related areas, including the use of information-theoretic concepts in physics and biology. However, other books have done this before and, in my opinion, better. In particular, the connection with 'entropy' in physics is not nearly as clear cut as the author makes it to be. All in all, if you already know a bit about Shannon's theory and have read some of these other books, I think this one will be disappointing. It's still a nice read -just does not have much *information* on it...

As many popular authors do, Gleick is hiding his e-mail address. Although this is understandable, it also blocks meaningful dialogue with scholars who understand his topics as well as he does. ==> It is necessary to publish the following critique broadly instead of discussing it quietly with the author. As good as the book is as a historical chronicle, it repeated suffers from unwarranted obfuscation--in this case failure to identify a thoroughly understood epistemological topic in clear, readily-understood language in favor of elevating it to something seemingly mysterious. The question I have in mind is the distinction between objects and values. (E.g., the number 5 is not an object, but rather a value which is shared by all sets that contain exactly five members.) The obfuscations I charge Gleick with are particularly prominent in his Chapter 9, "Entropy and Its Demons". which concludes with, "Most of the biosphere cannot see the infosphere: it is invisible, a parallel universe humming with ghostly inhabitants. But they are not ghosts to us ...". All this b.s. (an appropriate appellation) would vanish if Gleick simply pointed out that early 20th-century philosophers (Bertrand Russell, WIttgenstein, and their predecessors and successors in epistemology) understood and commented on the distinction. This weakness makes the book misleading--sufficiently so that I recommend against anybody trying to understand information theory from spending time with it.

This book probably is a good read if you treat it as a nice story of the evolution of the digital age, and while it touches various other aspects sometimes trying to derive rhetoric philosophy, largely its gibberish. James Gleick, like many other journalists or historians similar to Malcolm Gladwell, whenever write about technical subjects, really come out oversimplified and just plain corny. Either there is too much anecdotal talk about something that even the author doesn't seem to be clear about, or a collection of disjointed quotes in a feeble attempt to a make some point. The book's title really speaks about itself - A nice history, a confused theory and a drowning flood

Too much detail of an interesting but obscure subject

Too detailed and long. The reader misses the point of the chapter halfway through the first page. Also chapters do not have a summary. Pretty tedious.

"The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood" by James Gleick is the best purchase anyone could ever make at Amazon dot com.

Gleick does a poor job of addressing his argument, often making sweeping statements about history without providing primary source material to verify his claims. As an information studies graduate student, I had hoped for more .

The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick is a non-fiction book for the information age, talking about how people send information (and misinformation) from tum-tums in Africa, to Ada Lovelace, Alan turning and every “expert” on Twitter and Facebook. Mr. Gleick is an author who explores the consequences of science & technology on our society & culture. The book starts with a fascinating explanation of the tum-tums (African talking drums) and how they are able to send complex messages. Transitioning to telegraph and telephone communications the author explains their implications on social and commercial aspects. Going into symbolic languages, we delve into information theory and the important persona who contributed to the field (Claude Shannon, Charles Babbage, Ada Byron (Lovelace), Samuel Morse, Alan Turing, Stephen Hawking and more). If I had to describe this book in one word it would be “ambitious”. The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick encompasses many subjects, some more complicated than others, into a strong and enjoyable narrative. Mr. Gleick covers a lot in this book, one has to read it with an open mind even though sometimes I felt as if he is trying to convince me of a conclusion he already made, and is now trying to find evidence. This book, however, did open my eyes. There are subjects I thought I knew a lot about, but this book made me look at them from a different angle. I have been in IT for almost 3 decades (I didn’t realize it was this long until I wrote it down), still, I found this book entertaining and very informative. The author doesn’t dwell on one subject, but it’s an eclectic mix of math, art, science and more, tying together subjects which, on the surface, seems to have nothing in common. The last part of the book, in my opinion, was weak. That is too bad because the rest of the book was very interesting. A whole chapter dedicated to Wikipedia was too much, I’d rather would have learned more about crowdsourcing for information and content (book reviews?), and how that changed the Internet, and is most likely keeps changing. And yes, Wikipedia is a big part of that. I’m glad I read this book, not only did I learn several things, but to see subjects from another angle is one of the reasons I keep reading. And that, to me, is priceless.

Review of The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood by James Gleick by Prof. R.C. Before getting this book, as a gift from my son, I was contemplating a book with Some such title as: information, transmission, and cognition. This was inspired By my idea of extending Shannon's formula for information into higher-level media. (No such luck as yet!!). Going back to the work in question, the author did a thorough job in so many ways (Perhaps excessively so in some cases). His coverage of history of information is excellent; starting with fires on mountains, telegraph, telephone, etc. The author does also do well discussing the emergence of the internet as a great example of the 'information age.' Although there are crucial references, the idea of "cognition" (meaning of data, which in itself, may not mean much--i.e. Like looking at a Chinese text without knowing Chinese). He does, of course, mention The very idea of 'it's in the mind of the beholder, dummy!' In any case, the idea of Information is such a fuzzy dozy concept that no matter how one tries one fails to grasp (e.g. cognize?!) its nature.. When something is "in the mind of the beholder"; Wow, we got our work cut out for us! Looking at the subtitle: A History, A Theory, A Flood; this reviewer would say that the history is covered adequately; the theory, not so much; and the flood, thank God! For the information overload, I wish the author invented a phrase like "information pollution". Unfortunately, this reviewer got a lot of flack mentioning the term to a bunch of academics in a conference setting... (what were they thinking those academics made fun of by republican, perhaps rightly so!). Which brings us to the very idea of whether knowing too much is to be avoided. I used to blame my bro for not reading books, now I take that back! After all, my mom used to say: don't let your mind boil over! The real trouble with information is lots of people eagerly excreting it for their own satisfaction! As the roadrunner would say: That's all folks..

This book tended to jump all over and lacked a sense of narrative. The experience was unenlightening and rather obvious. Not an horrific effort but much less than it may have been.

Kind of dry. The author seems more interested in showing off his vocabulary than providing an enjoyable read. Laborious to read. Doesn't deliver on the hype. Sorry, but I can't recommend this one. :(

James Gleick is just the kind of author I normally dislike. He is not an expert in any of the subjects he writes about. He's not a scientist, but a science writer, so he tends to make mistakes in the science and emphasize things for dramatic value that no scientist would ever do. And he writes in a "narrative nonfiction" style that tends to impose a plot and characters onto history in a way that I just don't like. But I liked this book. Why? Because James Gleick has done his homework and pulled together several disparate threads to weave a history of the science of information that gets important things right in a very difficult technical field and tells the story of the most important characters whose work defines the field. He makes mistakes, surely, but anyone would. He's still a master at this. I have been studying this field for several years now and thought that I would be finding lots of mistakes and laughing at the superficial portrayal of the characters involved. But while I did find some mistakes, I was surprised to find that I learned a lot and in fact found out that I was laboring under a few mistakes in fact myself. For example, I knew about Claude Shannon and Norbert Wiener and how they had worked on different aspects of the science of information. But I did not know how much their paths had come together and how their ideas differed. Nowadays if you say "information theory" you will be taken to mean the field based on Claude Shannon's work where information is considered without regard to meaning. So Claude Shannon's thought remains current while Norbert Wiener's has faded. James Gleick gets into why that is and helped me understand better how in my work at least Norbert Wiener is the more important man. By the end of the book I was finding the narrative style a bit too much for my taste and my interest in the subject had flagged as well. Still, that did not dim my delight in having found a book that tackled the subject of information in much more depth than the typical popular treatment and did such an excellent job of it.

Spending money on an e-book about the current flood of information -- and spending time reading it -- feels like one of the stupidest things I have done in quite some time. James Gleick is a good writer. But he doesn't have a whole lot to say, here. One thing he does in this book is draw a distinction -- or rather highlight someone else's distinction -- between "information" and "meaning". This book has a fair amount of the former, not enough of the latter. I learned the term "noosphere". And the book gave me a keener appreciation for the degree of information pollution that has arisen from the latest leaps in technology that make it easier than ever for anyone to disseminate anything: I will think harder before publishing just any old blog post. I even thought hard before posting this review! This is not a bad book, but the ratio of text to meaning is annoyingly high. The acknowledgements, notes, bibliography, and index comprise more than 40% of the book's length. In my humble opinion, one's time would be better spent reading or re-reading the novel `Cryptonomicon', by Neal Stephenson, or the play `Arcadia', by Tom Stoppard, or even just sitting quietly and meditating.