The Information A History, a Theory, a Flood

This book should be required reading for those of us in the "information" business. If you work with computers or any sort of information science, this book tells a fascinating story about the predecessors that made so much of the current state-of-the-art a reality.

Ah! I am a sucker for this form in pop science: “primary research into some unjustly obscure thing, pulling together the historical and scientific strands, revealing the excitement and transcendence in the unsexy, un-Arts thing, and making the reader feel smarter and more solidly located in the modern world”. Here it's information technology very broadly construed – so African talking drums, Morse, bioinformatics, memetics, Hawking radiation, Wiki, and so on. Unbelievably, I’d never heard of the hero of the tale, Claude Shannon, because he was quiet and didn’t make any metaphysical claims for his profound work. Loads and loads of tasty gobbets to boot “I do not believe that my father was such a Poet as I shall be an Analyst (& Metaphysician)…” - Lovelace “A theoretical physicist acts as a very clever coding algorithm.” “Across the centuries they all felt the joy in reckoning: Napier and Briggs, Kepler and Babbage, making their lists, building their towers…” Shot through with the joy of discovery, and all of it unbleached by the drudgery, familiarity, and commercialism evoked in “I.T.”.

Completely fascinating journey through the history of how people share information and the ramifications on all other sorts of things in human history--took me a good bit of time to work through it but totally worth it. Author brings it to life with a lot of entertaining and colorful anecdotes.

The subject matter here is practically designed for me. I love the survey of communications from Baudot through McLuhan. The Hofstadter and Dennett references heighten the sense that this is almost a sequel to Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, which was very influential for me. Gleick maintains threads (e.g. to "differences" as photo-bits) that help tie the entire work together without relying merely on Shannon. Yet, somehow, as it progresses towards the end it seems to let go of those threads, and dive into navel gazing about the nature of culture. It could have woven everything together into the modern framing of information as fundamental to the universe, but instead it wandered into concerns about culture. Those might be interesting, but he hadn't done enough research or laid enough conceptual foundation for it to be authentic here. I can highly recommend the first 80% or so, though.

Overall an excellent read. Given that it's an area with which I'm intimately interested, I'm not too surprised that most of it is "review", but I'd highly recommend it to the general public to know more about some of the excellent history, philosophy, and theory which Gleick so nicely summarizes throughout the book. There are one or two references in the back which I'll have to chase down and read and one or two, which after many years, seem like they may be worth a second revisiting after having completed this. Even for the specialist, Gleick manages to tie together some disparate thoughts to create an excellent whole which makes it a very worthwhile read. I found towards the last several chapters, Gleick's style becomes much more flowery and less concrete, but most of it is as a result of covering the "humanities" perspective of information as opposed to the earlier parts of the text which were more specific to history and the scientific theories he covered.

Gleick does a great job of threading together various stories about the history of 'information'. The hero is very much Claude Shannon and his pioneering work but Gleick weaves in everyone from Babbage to Turing to Dawkins. There are a lot of big ideas here and one does become lost from time to time in the scientific jargon, but with the focus being largely on the people and the basic gist of their ideas, you never find yourself too adrift.