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A History, a Theory, a Flood
Pantheon
March 2011
On Sale: March 1, 2011
1054 pages
ISBN: 0375423729
EAN: 9780375423727
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
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.
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