The Information - A History, A Theory, A Flood

Zusatztext 45752986 Informationen zum Autor JAMES GLEICK  is our leading chronicler of science and technology, and the author of Chaos and Genius , both nominated for the National Book Award, and Isaac Newton , which was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize. His books have been translated into thirty languages. www.around.com Klappentext From the bestselling author of the acclaimed Chaos and Genius comes a thoughtful and provocative exploration of the big ideas of the modern era: Information, communication, and information theory. Acclaimed science writer James Gleick presents an eye-opening vision of how our relationship to information has transformed the very nature of human consciousness. A fascinating intellectual journey through the history of communication and information, from the language of Africa's talking drums to the invention of written alphabets; from the electronic transmission of code to the origins of information theory, into the new information age and the current deluge of news, tweets, images, and blogs. Along the way, Gleick profiles key innovators, including Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace, Samuel Morse, and Claude Shannon, and reveals how our understanding of information is transforming not only how we look at the world, but how we live.A New York Times Notable BookA Los Angeles Times and Cleveland Plain Dealer Best Book of the YearWinner of the PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award DRUMS THAT TALK (When a Code Is Not a Code)   Across the Dark Continent sound the never-silent drums: the base of all the music, the focus of every dance; the talking drums, the wireless of the unmapped jungle. —Irma Wassall (1943)   No one spoke simply on the drums. Drummers would not say, “Come back home,” but rather,   Make your feet come back the way they went, make your legs come back the way they went, plant your feet and your legs below, in the village which belongs to us.   They could not just say “corpse” but would elaborate: “which lies on its back on clods of earth.” Instead of “don’t be afraid,” they would say, “Bring your heart back down out of your mouth, your heart out of your mouth, get it back down from there.” The drums generated fountains of oratory. This seemed inefficient. Was it grandiloquence or bombast? Or something else?   For a long time Europeans in sub-Saharan Africa had no idea. In fact they had no idea that the drums conveyed information at all. In their own cultures, in special cases a drum could be an instrument of signaling, along with the bugle and the bell, used to transmit a small set of messages: attack; retreat; come to church . But they could not conceive of talking drums. In 1730 Francis Moore sailed eastward up the Gambia River, finding it navigable for six hundred miles, all the way admiring the beauty of the country and such curious wonders as “oysters that grew upon trees” (mangroves). He was not much of a naturalist. He was reconnoitering as an agent for English slavers in kingdoms inhabited, as he saw it, by different races of people of black or tawny colors, “as Mundingoes, Jolloiffs, Pholeys, Floops, and Portuguese.” When he came upon men and women carrying drums, carved wood as much as a yard long, tapered from top to bottom, he noted that women danced briskly to their music, and sometimes that the drums were “beat on the approach of an enemy,” and finally, “on some very extraordinary occasions,” that the drums summoned help from neighboring towns. But that was all he noticed.   A century later, Captain William Allen, on an expedition to the Niger River,(1) made a further discovery, by virtue of paying attention to his Cameroon pilot, whom he called Glasgow. They were in the cabin of the iron paddle ship when, as Allen recalled:   Suddenly he became...

Product details

• Authors: James Gleick
• Publisher: Vintage USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback
• Released: 31.03.2012
• EAN: 9781400096237
• ISBN: 978-1-4000-9623-7
• No. of pages: 544
• Dimensions: 132 mm x 203 mm x 28 mm
• Series: VINTAGE BOOKS
• Subject: Natural sciences, medicine, IT, technology > Natural sciences (general)