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.
Download [EPUB +MOBI]: http://sh.st/pP8Bb
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