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I just finished reading The Information by James Gleick.

tl;dr I rate the book 4 ½ stars.

Overview

This is the third book I've read by Gleick, after Chaos and Faster. I found it to be the most ambitious yet, tying together fields of study from history to biology to mathematics to communication.

The central theme is, of course, information. But what is information exactly? That is the question posed and re-posed, answered and answered again by scientists, philosophers and linguists over the centuries.

I find it a little ironic that trying to summarize the book here is to try to compress its information - an endeavor attempted broadly by new apps like Blinkist. What does it mean to summarize a book? Can the information be losslessly compressed? I think the repetition, the footnotes, the asides, in a word the redundancy is part of the learning experience for human beings. If I got anything out of this book, it's to appreciate information density and redundancy.

That out of the way, the book describes the history, the theory and the flood of information.

The history is told through the invention and adoption of new information-bearing technologies, namely the telegraph. For the first time in human history, communication could travel faster than a human being. Famously, a criminal jumped onto a train, believing himself to have escaped - only to be met by the police at the next stop, having been informed via telegraph! The telegraph, like written language before it, encoded information, now into dots, dashes and pauses.

Claude Shannon would go on to develop the laws of information theory in rigorous mathematics. This marked a revolution in the sciences, spreading to biology and physics. In biology, the discovery of DNA marked the transition to understanding life in terms of information transfer, famously espoused by Richard Dawkins in the Selfish Gene. In physics, information theory led to advancements in the understanding of black holes - eventually resolved by Stephen Hawking - and quantum mechanics.

Finally, the flood - that is, the modern day human experience of the internet, instantaneous interconnectedness to any person, book, article, movie, song, etc.. It surprises me that that psychologists in the mid century started studying information overload - without cell phones, email, or push notifications. One key takeaway was a study in which participants kept asking for more information even when it was detrimental to their effectiveness. Perhaps we have a thirst unable to be quenched, because in our history we lived in a dry desert.

What I liked

Gleick's books make me feel smart - I attribute that to his skill at science writing, I finish feeling like I learned a great deal. This book was education in breadth as opposed to education in depth with Chaos. When picking it up, I didn't imagine it'd cover Gödel's theorem, Maxwell's demon, African drum talk, Turing machines, Kolmogorov complexity, quantum mechanics, and the memetics. Gleick managed to weave it all together in a compelling narrative - I had no trouble keeping motivated to finish the book.

What I didn't like

My only complaint is that the book's ambition may have exceeded its result. In a way, the book itself is flooded with information, and that can drown out the message (how meta!).

Wrap up

James Gleick is one of my favorite science authors, and The Information delivers. Do yourself a favor and check it out.

Bonus quote

I promised myself I'd record this quote from the book, from Robert Burton in 1621:

I hear new news every day, and those ordinary rumours of war, plagues, fires, inundations, thefts, murders, massacres, meteors, comets, spectrums, prodigies, apparitions, of towns taken, cities besieged in France, Germany, Turkey, Persia, Poland, &c. daily musters and preparations, and such like, which these tempestuous times afford, battles fought, so many men slain, monomachies, shipwrecks, piracies, and sea-fights, peace, leagues, strategems, and fresh alarms. A vast confusion of vows, wishes, actions, edicts, petitions, lawsuits, pleas, laws, proclamations, complaints, grievances are daily brought to our ears. New books every day, pamphlets, currantoes, stories, whole catalogues of volumes of all sorts, new paradoxes, opinions, schisms, heresies, controversies in philosophy, religion, &c. Now come tidings of weddings, maskings, mummeries, entertainments, jubiless, embassies, tilts and tournaments, trophies, triumphs, revels, sports, plays: then again, as in a new shifted scene, treasons, cheating tricks, robberies, enormous villanies in all kinds, funerals, burials, deaths of Princes, new discoveries, expeditions; now comical then tragical matters. To-day we hear of new Lords and officers created, to-morrow of some great men deposed, and then again of fresh honours conferred; one is let loose, another imprisoned; one purchaseth, another breaketh: he thrives, his neighbour turns bankrupt; now plenty, then again dearth and famine; one runs, another rides, wrangles, laughs, weeps &c. Thus I daily hear, and such like.

All that without Twitter. Nothing new under the sun.