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This book summarizes how information changed since the early 1800s, what it looks like today, including how it is being influenced by such current circumstances as the role of Big Data, artificial intelligence, misinformation on the Internet, and the automation of decision-making by computers using digital and analog information.
List of contents
Preface
1. Learning From the History of Information
2. How Information and Computers Changed Work
3. Do We Live in an Information Age?
4. The Rise of Big Data
5. How Factual Is Information and Why We Should Care
6. A Way to Look at Information Today
7. The Special Issue of Artificial Intelligence
Bibliographic Essay
Index
About the author
James W. Cortada is a Senior Research Fellow at the Charles Babbage Institute at the University of Minnesota-Minneapolis. He holds a Ph.D. in modern history and spent nearly 4 decades working at IBM in various sales, managerial, and research positions. He has spent nearly a half-century at the center of much that went on in the world's engagement with computers and has written on its contemporary uses in business publications, history of computing, and on the history of information for over four decades. He has published over a dozen books on the role of information in modern society, including
Fake News Nation: The Long History of Lies and Misinterpretations in America (R&L 2019),
Building Blocks of Society: History, Information Ecosystems, and Infrastructures (R&L 2021) and
Birth of Modern Facts: How the Information Revolution Transformed Academic Research, Governments, and Businesses (R&L 2023).
