Information flows everywhere, through wires and genes, through brain cells and quarks. But while it may appear ubiquitous to us now, until recently we had no awareness of what information was or how it worked. In his new book, The Information, science writer James Gleick documents the rising role of information in our lives and the way new technologies continue to increase its velocity, volume, and importance. Gleick—whose first book, Chaos, was a National Book Award finalist and whose biographies of Richard Feynman and Isaac Newton were both short-listed for the Pulitzer—spent seven years compiling his epic account. Wired spoke with Gleick about his unified history of the fundamental force behind life, the universe, and everything.

Kevin Kelly: What prompted you to write a whole lot of information about information?

James Gleick: I’ve been thinking of this book my whole career. When I was working on Chaos, the young rebels of the Dynamical Systems Collective in Santa Cruz would try to explain Claude Shannon’s invention of information theory to me. I didn’t understand it at the time. Investigating Shannon’s ideas became the fulcrum of this book.

Kelly: What were those ideas?

Gleick: Shannon said that the notion of information has nothing to do with meaning. A string of bits has a quantity, whether it represents something that’s true, something that’s utterly false, or something that’s just meaningless nonsense. If you were a scientist or an engineer, that idea was very liberating; it enabled you to treat information as a manipulable thing.

Kelly: And how would you define this thing?

Gleick: Scientifically, information is a choice—a yes-or-no choice. In a broader sense, information is everything that informs our world—writing, painting, music, money.

Kelly: And as we came to understand how information works, that impacted our understanding of how our bodies and minds operate, too, right?

Gleick: Yes. Information is crucial to our biological substance—our genetic code is information. But before 1950, it was not obvious that inheritance had anything to do with code. And it was only after the invention of the telegraph that we understood that our nerves carry messages, just like wires. When we look back through history, we can see that a lot of different stories all turn out to be stories about information.

Kelly: Let’s talk about your title, The Information. What are you trying to do with the word the there?

Gleick: [Laughs.] What can I say about that? I just got it into my head early on. I have tried not to become too conscious of why exactly I came up with it.

Kelly: What it communicates to me is that information is a definite, specific thing, rather than an indefinite generalization.

Gleick: You got the transmission correctly.

Pages: Previous 12 | Full Page | Next