The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

Written by:
James Gleick
Narrated by:
Rob Shapiro

Unabridged Audiobook

Ratings
Book
11
Narrator
2
Release Date
March 2011
Duration
16 hours 38 minutes
Summary
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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Reviews
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Rapha P.

Good book, a bit too computer oriented at some points but worths a read

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Anonymous

Much of this book was over my head scientifically, but what I did understand was fascinating. I listened to it twice to try and get more out of it.

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