Gleick, James. The Information: A Theory, A History, A Flood. New York: Random House, 2012.
James Gleick’s national bestseller The Information: A Theory, A History, A Flood is an account, directed more or less at a popular audience, about the origins and development of information theory and modern computing systems, starting with the computational dreams of Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage and extending all the way through the “new global organism” (414) of international information networks. Being so broad in scope, Gleick’s work represents both an informational gold mine and a difficult-to-navigate morass—though his account, as far as I can tell, is exhaustive, many seemingly trivial factors will prevent me from making extensive use of his work. The fact that not a single quotation is cited in-text is a case in point. Every reference will necessitate a good deal of combing through the bibliography and even more guesswork to tease out, and there doesn’t seem to be a very strenuous guarantee on accuracy. The popular nature of the work, though making it incredibly accessible, has the additional downside of forcing Gleick into the position of picking out protagonists and antagonists in the history of information theory and computing—Norbert Weiner, whose work will occupy a central place in my project, is cast as a gnomic, narcissistic prima donna and not much else, for example. Though these things may be (and probably are) true, Weiner’s theorizing of cybernetics and its subsequent popularization is crucial to my project, and Gleick neglects its development in favor of following an “underdog” Claude Shannon through his late-career struggles. In all, The Information: A Theory, A History, A Flood will be a decent resource for broad knowledge about the development of US information theory, particularly the strand articulated by Claude Shannon, though it will in all likelihood provide little else.
globecultureform 