James Gleick’s The Information: A history, a theory, a flood is a biography of information that puts today’s revolution in some much-needed context
FOR most of history, messages were things: clay tablets, scrolls, scraps of paper, even glyphs tattooed on to the head of a slave, which were revealed only when he visited the message receiver’s barber. But over time, and especially during the 20th century, mathematicians, engineers and inventors slowly began to divorce the content of a message from its physical vehicle, and in doing so changed how humans used and understood information.
Most importantly, these thinkers refined the…
