The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood [Paperback]

I'm not sure the reviews so far are terribly helpful if you want a quick feel for whether to read this book or not. So here goes.

It's basically a bravura sweep through the history of information, told with great panache and lots of anecdote, mixing straight narrative with reflection on wider significance, and attempting to explain quite difficult concepts for the non-specialised reader. Whatever else it may or may not be, I found it a lively and enjoyable read.

The book falls broadly into three sections. The first runs through key early stages in the creation, storage and use of information - the alphabet, printing, the telegraph, telephone, etc. I didn't find much new here but the author did a great job marshalling facts, figures, characters and anecdotes into a lively tale.

The heart of the book grapples with information as a scientific concept, and you will find yourself in the realm of computers, information theory, DNA and quantum mechanics (to name but a few). This isn't natural territory for me, but I was swept along by Gleick's style and even felt I understood some of the underlying mathematical concepts he sought to explain.

The final section is essentially a thought piece on the modern information age, considering the ubiquity of information from the internet and the perils of information overload. Rather like the first section, I didn't feel there was a great deal new here but Gleick's ability to call up literary references, make parallels across the centuries and ask the pertinent questions made it an engaging read. I'm certainly pleased to have made the acquaintance of Vincent of Beauvais, a thirteenth century monk who seems to have arrived 750 years early for the Information Age.

So, a dazzling read certainly, but one also with a great deal of substance. Recommended.

James Gleick's books - Chaos, Genius, Isaac Newton, and the present - share the attractive traits of being intelligently conceived, meticulously researched and beautifully realized;the author is erudite, conveys the distinctive atmosphere of an era, the character of its actors, the anectode while he is a delightful storyteller;his prose is simple but conceptually rich and expansive. The book traces the evolution of human communication and its impact on culture from oral communication to the twenty-first century and the internet, Wikipedia and cloud computing. A recurring theme in this evolution is the rapid increase in information which in recent years has been phenomenal with information increasing exponentially.

Because of its centrality in the book, I commence the review and somewhat elaborate on Shannon's 'Theory of Information'. The year 1948 was for Bell Telephone Laboratories an annus mirabilis. During that year Claude Shannon then aged 32 published his theory of information titled 'A Mathematical Theory of Communication' while working at Bell Labs and coined the word bit;the transistor was invented in the same year and lab but the word 'transistor' was the product of committee deliberation.

Shannon in his theory defines the information content of an event as being proportional to the logarithm of its inverse probability of occurence. Shannon's theory of information is related to Entropy in that an increase in Entropy in a system increases its disorder while concurrently increasing its information content.

In Shannon's theory of information, the fundamental concept of distinguishability between two different states is a bit of information. A bit, by definition, exists in one of two different states at any given time - a zero or a one;where you have more than two outcomes, you simply use more bits to distinguish them all. Shannon's information theory relates to events based on Boolean logic i.e for an event with several outcomes, each outcome happens or does not happen.

Shannon's information theory has a very wide applicability in that it has the same logical foundation in different physical, biological, social and economic phenomena.

All the preceding relate to classical physics and the classical worldview. However, a more accurate description of our physical world is given by quantum theory which has superseded classical physics. With quantum theory the notion of a deterministic world fails, events always occur with a probability regardless of how much information we possess.

Classical bits as we have already explained exist in one of two different states at any given time - a zero or a one. With quantum mechanics, however, we are permitted to have a zero and a one at the same time in one physical system. In fact we are permitted to have an infinite range of states between zero and one which we call a qubit.

It has been established that Shannon's theory of information can be successfully extended to account for quantum theory and potentially to a quantum computer with enormous capability.

The evolution from oral speech to writing was effected through a progression from pictographic, writing the picture;to ideographic, writing the idea;and then logographic, writing the word. This journey led from things to words, from words to categories, from categories to metaphor and logic. We know that formal logic is the invention of Greek culture after it had interiorized the technology of alphabetic writing. The culture of literacy developed its many gifts:history and the law;the sciences and philosophy;the reflective application of art and literature itself.

For a long period the written word was the task of scribes. The revolution came from Johannes Gutenberg (c.1400-68) who was the first in the West to print using movable type and was the first to use a press. Printing books naturally assisted in their wide dissemination. But it was left to Elizabeth Eisenstein in her landmark scholarship, two volumes titled 'The Printing Press as an Agent of Change'published in 1979 to conclusively demonstrate printing as the communications revolution essential to the transition from medieval times to modernity.

And from the extensive treatment of Shannon's theory of information to the telegraphic presentation of the three waves of electrical communication erected in sequence:telegraphy, telephony, and radio which collectively annihilated space and time. Naturally ingenuity was required to effect the crossing point between electricity and language and also the interface between device and human.

It is worth noting that both Claude Shannon for whom we have spoken at length and Alan Turing, the British genius, who apart from breaking the German Enigma code also conceived the elegant ethereal abstaction of Universal machine were engaged in cryptography during World War II and even met in Bell labs cafeteria but naturally did not talk to each other on the specific nature of their secret work.

I shall conclude the review with information in biological systems:DNA serves as one-dimensional storage of information;DNA also (information transfer)sends that information outward for use in the making of the organism. The data stored in a one-dimensional strand has to flower forth in three dimensions. This information transfer occurs via messages passing from nucleic acids to proteins. So DNA not only replicates itself;separately, it dictates the manufacture of something entirely different.

When the genetic code was solved, in the early 1960s, it turned to be full of redundancy. The redundancy serves exactly the purpose that an information theorist would expect. It provides tolerance for errors.

By naming the book 'The Information' rather than just 'Information', Gleick is raising an abstract, ubiquitous and banal concept into something far more important. It is a truism to say that we live in the Information Age. But now we live in the Age of The Information. Our whole lives and consciousnesses are steeped in an all-pervasive, inescapable field of information. But it turns out that Information may be even more fundamental than that. This book explores the development of Information - both as theory and history - and in doing so questions our notions of a material reality.

The sub-title of the book - 'A History, a Theory, a Flood' outlines the approach. Starting with a brief exposition of theory, he goes on to relate a history of information before returning to review just where we may be now - and, indeed, just what we may be now.

To start with then, it seems almost as if the history of civilisation since at least Plato has been a process of purification, the removal of extraneous ideas, superfluous matter to get down to the fundamentals. And the most fundamental of all fundamentals is Information. In the Prologue, Gleick suggests:

'...as scientists finally come to understand information, they wonder whether it may be primary: more fundamental than matter itself. They suggest that the bit is the irreducible kernel and that information forms the very core of existence. Bridging the physics of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, John Archibald Wheeler, the last surviving collaborator of both Einstein and Bohr, put this manifesto in oracular monosyllables: "It from Bit." Information gives rise to "every it - every particle, every field of force, even the spacetime continuum itself."' (P10)

This history of information starts, surprisingly, with African talking drums (which are fascinating) - not a code, but an unwritten, spoken, language. From there, we move to the defining moment when writing was invented. This allowed humanity to convert:

'...mentally, from a "prose of narrative" to a "prose of ideas"; organizing experience in terms of categories rather than events; embracing the discipline of abstraction...This was the discovery, not just of the self, but of the thinking self - in effect, the true beginning of consciousness.

In our world of ingrained literacy, thinking and writing seem scarcely related activities. We can imagine the latter depending on the former, but surely not the other way around: everyone thinks, whether or not they write. But [Eric] Havelock was right. The written word - the persistent word - was a prerequisite for conscious thought as we understand it. It was the trigger for a wholesale, irreversible change in the human psyche - psyche being the word favored by Socrates/Plato as they struggled to understand.' (P37)

We can only have history if we have writing. We can only have deductive reasoning and syllogisms if we have writing. There are no syllogisms in Homer specifically because Homer was passed down by word-of-mouth. Logic, deductive reasoning - all depend on writing. We have/we owe our consciousness (or, at least, its current form) in/to writing.

So this fundamental change, this codification and materialisation of thought, gave us the basis for thinking about 'information' and, really, for creating, communicating and contemplating it too.

From this point, Gleick goes on to outline a comprehensive history of 'information'. At times, it reads almost like a Foucaultian discourse but, as it gets nearer our present times, much of it may be familiar. From Charles Babbage, Morse Code to Alan Turing and on to Claude Shannon, Norbert Wiener and cybernetics (see Simon Singh's 'The Code Book' and Katherine Hailes ironically titled 'How We Became Posthuman' - both listed in the extensive bibliography) then to Dawkins' Memes, the appearance of maths in the biological sciences and, inevitably, to Kurt Gödel's 'incompleteness' theorem, we start to move back towards theory. But here, things start getting a little weird. To start with, we see the re-emergence of chaos. Gleick quotes Joseph Ford, a 'physicist studying the behaviour of unpredictable dynamical systems':

'"Chaotic orbits exist but they are Gödel's children, so complex, so overladen with information that humans can never comprehend them. But chaos is ubiquitous in nature; therefore the universe is filled with countless mysteries that man can never understand."'

To which Gleick adds: 'Yet one still tries to take their measure.' (P343-4)

Slowly, it seems that Gleick's concept of Information is becoming the ultimate in reification - an abstract concept that is taking on a physical presence. Gleick quotes Landauer (an exile from Nazi Germany working for IBM):

'Landauer devoted his career to establishing the physical basis of information. "Information Is Physical" was the title of one famous paper, meant to remind the community that computation requires physical objects and obeys the laws of physics...Whether a bit is a mark on a stone tablet or a hole in a punched card or a particle with spin up or down, he insisted that it could not exist without some embodiment.' (P361)

Yet a few pages later, Gleick is quoting from Borges' 'Library of Babel' and suggesting Wikipedia's Sisyphean task has an essentially Gödel-like eternal recursiveness as information grows, Gleick suggests, 'dendritically'.

So maybe, then, this reification is a two-way street. 'The Information' becomes the final, biggest reification where information and material reality become one and the same, as in Lewis Carroll's 1:1 scale map (P384). Are we finally heading for Kurtzweil's 'Singularity'? In some ways, this just seems like some kind of post-modernist manifesto:

'...a world where all bits are equal and information is divorced from meaning.' (P403-4)

In the end, Gleick draws back from this. In the Epilogue (The Return of Meaning), he says that the Infinite Library is now the universe but we are not phantoms in this universe; we are perhaps the librarians, cataloguing, categorising, searching for, and finding, meaning.