If you are looking for a good place to start reading about the web,
Big-Data and such like, Gleick's "The Information" should not be your
first choice. Or the second one, or the Nth one for that matter. The title
reads – a History, a Theory, a Flood. The History gets about a third of the
book, the Theory, all the rest except for two offshoot chapters at the end. The
flood – the web – is not completely neglected, but it is not the story Gleick
wanted to tell. "Internet" is indeed in the index. It has 5 references.
Information Theory kind of takes up all the rest.
This does not mean that the book lacks its charms. The episodes
about African drum languages, first dictionaries, Charles Babbage and Lady
Lovelace are excellent. The last one in particular oozes 19th century goodies
for the steampunk fan. The description of Europe's Semaphore towers systems and
the different pricing mechanisms used by telegraph companies so similar to
today's Cellular providers are also worthwhile, as is the description of the
scientific research of the phenomena of chain letters.
The main course of the book is also decent. Chapters discussing the
formation of the information theory present an interesting introduction to
Claude Shannon and his work and a general informative introduction to the
contributions of many others such as Turing, Gödel and Kolmogorov.
Nevertheless, they seem to send the first time reader into too many directions
at once, and the conscious effort made to create a coherent plot does not pay
off.
Later chapters describing the use of information theory in biology,
specifically in genetics, and then in physics create a dendritic plot line that
seems at times quite random. In one of the last chapters, the one dedicated to
quantum computing, Gleick completely leaves the casual reader out of his aims -
this chapter's only possible result would be not an understanding of the
subject matter but at best an admiration for the heroes who do, Gleick
supposedly among them.
Like Gleick's "Chaos", "The Information" is quite
taxing. Too much of the text seems to form separate parts that could only be
brought together under a title as ephemeral as "Information". Quite a
few times the speckle of actual mathematics thrown in is non-rigorous in the
sense that it does not supply the necessary stepping stones for the casual
reader to follow, meaning it is there for only two possible reasons: for
decoration or for showing just how smart Gleick is.
Wikipedia tells me the book was on New-York Times' best seller list for
three weeks. My guess would be that it was bought either by people thinking it
was about the web, or bought as a present. I will also venture to guess that
most of its readers did not make it past the first half.
For those who didn't here are two good quotes Gleick picked up:
Daniel Dennett: "A scholar is just a library's way of making
another library".
Alexander Pope: "Providence has permitted the invention of Printing
as a scourge for the sins of the learned".
It was also cool to learn that William Gibson called Borges "Our
heresiarch uncle".
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