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Title details for The Information by James Gleick - Available

The Information

A History, a Theory, a Flood

by James Gleick
Rob Shapiro
Audiobook
3 of 3 copies available
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3 of 3 copies available

James Gleick, the author of the best sellers Chaos and Genius, now brings us a work just as astonishing and masterly: a revelatory chronicle and meditation that shows how information has become the modern era’s defining quality—the blood, the fuel, the vital principle of our world.
 
The story of information begins in a time profoundly unlike our own, when every thought and utterance vanishes as soon as it is born. From the invention of scripts and alphabets to the long-misunderstood talking drums of Africa, Gleick tells the story of information technologies that changed the very nature of human consciousness. He provides portraits of the key figures contributing to the inexorable development of our modern understanding of information: Charles Babbage, the idiosyncratic inventor of the first great mechanical computer; Ada Byron, the brilliant and doomed daughter of the poet, who became the first true programmer; pivotal figures like Samuel Morse and Alan Turing; and Claude Shannon, the creator of information theory itself.
 
And then the information age arrives. Citizens of this world become experts willy-nilly: aficionados of bits and bytes. And we sometimes feel we are drowning, swept by a deluge of signs and signals, news and images, blogs and tweets. The Information is the story of how we got here and where we are heading.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Awards

  • Release date

    March 1, 2011

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9780307914996
      • File size: 478927 KB
      • Duration: 16:37:45

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      James Gleick provides a chronicle of the history of information, which he views as the most pivotal aspect of the human condition. Biographical sketches of key figures such as Samuel Morse, the creator of Morse Code, are included. Narrator Rob Shapiro's friendly, resonant tones are well suited to the material. However, his dynamic performance does little to enhance or make more approachable the academic and scientific arguments and frameworks presented. Discussions of the communication roles of African drums, the telegraph, the telephone, transistors, television, and the flood of bits and bytes in the computer age lead to the listener's growing awareness that there is limitless growth in our capacity to store and use information. While this idea and the evidence that supports it are fascinating theoretically, neither Gleick nor Shapiro makes this book an absorbing listen. W.A.G. (c) AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from February 21, 2011
      In 1948, Bell Laboratories announced the invention of the electronic semiconductor and its revolutionary ability to do anything a vacuum tube could do but more efficiently. While the revolution in communications was taking these steps, Bell Labs scientist Claude Shannon helped to write a monograph for them, A Mathematical Theory of Communication, in which he coined the word bit to name a fundamental unit of computer information. As bestselling author Gleick (Chaos) astutely argues, Shannon's neologism profoundly changed our view of the world; his brilliant work introduced us to the notion that a tiny piece of hardware could transmit messages that contained meaning and that a physical unit, a bit, could measure a quality as elusive as information. Shannon's story is only one of many in this sprawling history of information. With his brilliant ability to synthesize mounds of details and to tell rich stories, Gleick leads us on a journey from one form of communicating information to another, beginning with African tribes' use of drums and including along the way scientists like Samuel B. Morse, who invented the telegraph; Norbert Wiener, who developed cybernetics; and Ada Byron, the great Romantic poet's daughter, who collaborated with Charles Babbage in developing the first mechanical computer. Gleick's exceptional history of culture concludes that information is indeed the blood, the fuel, and the vital principle on which our world runs.

    • Publisher's Weekly

      May 2, 2011
      Overwhelmed as we are with today's unceasing gush of informationâsome essential, some useless, and much falling into the broad middle of the spectrumâa study of how we got here and the innovators who played a part in creating the dazzling web of contemporary communications could not be more timely. Gleick's survey of pioneers of information, from Alan Turing to Claude Shannon, follows the many-layered strands forming the information superhighway. Rob Shapiro, slightly nasal, reads in measured fashion, pausing luxuriously between sentences and paragraphs to allow Gleick's own gush of information to sink in. Shapiro's stateliness makes for an artful contrast with Gleick's study of go-go modernity; listening to the audiobook manages to not add to the feeling of being overwhelmed. A Pantheon hardcover.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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