Profoundity, Profundity
My previous three reviews have been thousand word monsters. Remarkably, a thousand words seem too less to capture what Gleick manages to achieve in the book The Information, even though all I am writing is a review. So I’ll have to find a shorter way.
Gleick begins the arduous task by trying to explain what “information” actually is. This is a difficult task in itself – for most of human history, the focus has merely been on the ways of recording information and not on the nature of information itself, whether one takes old papyrus scrolls, animal hides, cuneiform tablets, or, later on, the printing press.
He begins by examining language and how it represents information – how a finite set of symbols can in various combinations seemingly represent an infinite number of messages. From there, he charts the growth of the telegraph, developed for sending such messages over long distances. He mentions how its advent made man feel he had conquered space and time, and draws a parallel with the modern world – managing to capture the human reaction and response whenever any new paradigms in information handling, and consequently communication, have emerged.
He covers Babbage and Ada Lovelace, with the former’s conception of the Analytic Engine that could solve all sorts of problems based on “mechanical programming”. He discusses Watson and Crick’s discovery of the DNA’s structure – what genetic information is and how can an organism develop merely on the basis of the combinations of the 4 nucleobases. He discusses Turing and the history of cryptography – which began with the statistical analysis of various combinations of letters of various lengths (in a given language), followed by an algorithmic approach to find similar patterns in the encoded messages. And finally he moves on to Claude Shannon, undoubtedly the protagonist of the book (just to clear it, the book isn’t biographical in nature). Shannon, the father of Information Theory, heralded a new way of looking at information – divorce it of its meaning. For transmitting purposes, said he, “meaning” was dispensable.
In effect, all of them were trying to understand what “information” is; what forms it can take; how it can be processed, understood, analysed, and what sorts of operations are possible on it.
Dictionaries, code books for telegraphic codes, logarithm tables, programs, algorithms, DNA, internet – all of them, he says, are nothing but attempts at capturing the essence and manipulating the properties of “information”.
Towards the end he talks about the information explosion that has taken place over the last few decades. This has not only led to a (parallel) rapid advancement in technologies to handle, process, make sense of and apply that information (we live in the IT age, remember?), but it has also affected the way humans perceive information. It has clear psychological effects, which we are not in a position to understand presently.
“Information is not knowledge, and knowledge is not wisdom”.
Even if you thought you knew what ‘information’ actually is, which an overwhelming majority of us anyway don’t, it will still make you look at the idea from a new perspective. The kind of analogies, parallels and connections we are shown are too profound for a reading of one sitting. I recommend not finishing this book in a few days. Let its ideas seep into you, let the enormity of the messages conveyed make a gradual impression on your mind, and let it make you ask new questions – not just on new topics, but in new realms.
This is the second book I have read on this topic in the last 6-7 months. The other one was Information – a Very Short Introduction by Luciano Floridi. Undoubtedly that was a more erudite effort at conveying the same concepts, but due to the sheer size of the book – a book of the ‘A Very Short Introduction’ series (by Oxford University Press) rarely crosses 150 pages in page size octavo – the scope of the two works can’t be compared. Floridi tackles more of the theoretical and philosophical aspects related to information, whereas Gleick is tackling more of the historical and practical (read technological) narrative.
Pardon if my review has meandered too much. It is mostly a result of having too many thoughts and ideas from the book at the same time – and that is precisely what you’ll take back from this book.