Gleick, James. The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood.

McAnany, Emile

Gleick, James. The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood. New York: Pantheon Books, 2011. Pp. 544. ISBN 978-0375423727 (cloth) $29.95.

If readers read only one book this year, it should be James Gleick's history of information. This for two reasons: first, because we all live in a world of information from our smart phones, iPads, and immersion in music and images that absorbs more of our lives than we care to admit. Second, as communication scholars, we will do well to understand better our historical connections with the beginnings of this flood. The author makes a compelling argument from his Prologue that the crucial moment in the start of the information era began in 1948. At Bell Labs the two events of that year encompassed, first, the creation of the transistor by William Shockley and his team that made the present information economy possible; but more important in the author's opinion was the second: the publication of Claude Shannon's "The Mathematical Theory of Communication" in the Bell System Technical Journal (and the next year as a book by the same title with and added chapter by Warren Weaver who helped explain the highly mathematical theory more in layman's terms) (Shannon & Weaver, 1949). In trying to explain why he considers the Shannon theory more important than the Shockley transistor, Gleick uses the remainder of the book to provide the historical struggle to find a unifying theory for all of the world's codes from the creation of the alphabet to the modern world of the information ocean in which we swim (and sometimes drown). His thesis is that Shannon's relatively brief but elegant theory provided the unifying vision in which the budding computer age found a way forward to the age of instant and pervasive information. Weaver's contribution was his argument that the engineering problems that Shannon helped to solve for measurement, storage, and movement of information in as distortion-free a system as possible was necessarily involved with the question of the message or content of the information bits that were sent and received and of the consequences for those receiving these messages. He thought the theory was not just about information but about communication. (As a footnote and an additional tie to our field, Wilbur Schramm at the university of Illinois who is credited by some as the founder of the field of communication helped to get the book published at the university of Illinois Press.)

The author begins his history with the African Talking Drum to return the reader to a time even before the creation of writing. In this first chapter he begins to lay out his argument for the development of codes, in acoustic and in tonal forms in the drums that lasted up to the mid-20th century. In a second chapter he synthesizes a discussion of what writing meant to culture in the Greek classical period but also with illustrations from other forms of writing, including that of cuneiform which emphasized the even more abstract form of coding in written form, mathematics. He begins the written language phenomenon with citations from Walter Ong and Marshall McLuhan to have readers try to imagine what a pre-literate or oral culture was like. He argues that with the translation of spoken language into written form, we have begun the transition of the coding of thought into more abstract symbols and the emergence of human history and even of human consciousness.

Gleick's third chapter begins with the first printed dictionary in the London of Shakespeare's time, 1604. He draws two themes from this long chapter on dictionaries. First, Robert Cawdrey who drew up this Table Alaphabeticall was the first person in the English language to think of listing his 2,500 words in an alphabetical order, a technological invention that changed the notion of searching definitions and of organizing words in a way that abstracted from their meaning but made the search so much more efficient. The author argues that this was a breakthrough that helped to not only organize the meaning of words but led eventually to formalizing of spelling and helped to teach literacy to a largely illiterate population. The second theme is his focus on the creation and growth of the Oxford English Dictionary in the 19th century when James Murray tried to include all of the words in English with their multiple meanings and their historical origins. The work was so massive that the final printed version came many years after the first editor's death. At present English is spoken by perhaps a billion people, and in its online version the OED includes almost a million words, with no end in sight. The point that he makes is that with the modern way of thinking about definitions and word creation, the explosion of dictionary "information" fits in directly with the availability of modern computing. He finishes the chapter to remind readers that his book is about communication: "Like the printing press, the telegraph, and the telephone before it, the Internet is transforming the language simply by transmitting information differently. What makes cyberspace different from all previous information technologies is its intermixing of scales from the largest to the smallest without prejudice, broadcasting to millions, narrowcasting to groups, instant messaging one to one" (p. 77).

In Chapter 5 the story of the telegraph is told in some detail, but it does not resemble the usual tale of Samuel F.B. Morse and his code. Rather, Gleick, as he does with all of his chapters, writes a dense history of science and technology that leads back to Shannon. The long detour through the French system of mechanical semaphores promotes the search for codes that could translate into an efficient system of information. The Morse code was a flash of insight into how the alphabet could be coded into 1s and 0s or dots and dashes, a march toward Shannon's bits of a century later. The chapter includes a discussion of how codes began to include numbers and, in some cases, could substitute numbers for language-based codes. The author returns to Shannon's story in Chapter 6 and winds this part of the story into the development of the telephone and the creation of the Bell Telephone Company where Shannon would create his theory of communication. Chapter 7 provides not only a history but also a detailed technical background to Shannon's theory along with its publication as a book from the university of Illinois where Wilbur Schramm as director of the uIPress recognized its relevance to the new field of Communication that he was just beginning (Rogers, 1994, Chs. 11, 12). Gleick points out the critical meeting of Shannon with Allan Turing, the British mathematician who is credited with the first concept of the modern computer. They met in 1943 when both were working on cryptography for their governments.

In Chapters 8 through 13, the author turns his gaze from what led up to the 1949 publication of Shannon and Weaver's book to the spread of the basic idea of information theory to other scientific fields and to the world of computing that today is so pervasive. Shannon had, for his doctoral dissertation at MIT, applied his thinking about information to genetics, a field that had not yet been created. The dissertation was never published, but it foreshadowed the view that the body's genetic system is essentially a code system with what would later be called a genome. Even the double helix would come a decade after Shannon finished his Ph.D. Chapters 14 and 15 of the book look at one of the dark sides of the information system that Shannon helped to foment: information overload. And Gleick begins with Jorge Luis Borges grim story of "The Library of Babel" where the narrator recounts that the mythical library contains all of the books in the world--but none can be opened. The joy of universal knowledge turns to bitter frustration, and the reader is reminded of the Tower of Babel allegory from the Bible. Gleick paints a graphic picture of how we are more and more experiencing the sense of being overwhelmed by the very information machinery that we have woven into our culture. But he also invokes Marshall McLuhan--to argue that we are entering a new age of communication and information just as McLuhan had suggested for the age of television in the 1960s--and Elizabeth Eisenstein who explains the positive consequences of the printing press. With the likes of Google's algorithms, Gleick has more hope for the future than some other critics of our age of information.

A word about how and whether Shannon fits into the general field of communication as it is manifest today in the thousands of university departments that have sprung up since 1948. Wlibur Schramm, who Everett Rogers (1994) argued was the founder of the field of communication study, was certain in 1949 that Shannon would be central to the field. But that expectation has not been met over the past 60 years. Yes, information theory has had wide influence in many fields besides computer science, but if we heed Warren Weaver's argument, Shannon's theory necessarily encompasses not only the engineering side of information but also the human meaning of the term. If Shannon was in some sense seminal to the creation of all of the information and communication technologies that have followed from his theory in 1949, then his legacy is certainly tied closely to our field historically. James Gleick's history of Shannon theory, then, becomes our history as well.

The book has extensive notes, a lengthy bibliography, and a complete index.

References

Rogers, E. (1994). A history of communication study: A biographical approach. New York: The Free Press.

Shannon, C., & Weaver, W. (1949). The mathematical theory of communication. urbana: university of Illinois Press.

--Emile McAnany

Santa Clara University