In a sense, The Information is a book about everything, from words
themselves to talking drums, writing and lexicography, early attempts
at an analytical engine, the telegraph and telephone, ENIAC, and the
ubiquitous computers that followed. But that's just the "History."
The "Theory" focuses on such 20th-century notables as Claude Shannon,
Norbert Wiener, Alan Turing, and others who worked on coding, decoding,
and re-coding both the meaning and the myriad messages transmitted via
the media of their times. In the "Flood," Gleick explains genetics as
biology's mechanism for informational exchange--Is a chicken just an
egg's way of making another egg?--and discusses self-replicating memes
(ideas as different as earworms and racism) as information's own
evolving meta-life forms. Along the way, readers learn about music and
quantum mechanics, why forgetting takes work, the meaning of an
"interesting number," and why "[t]he bit is the ultimate unsplittable
particle." What results is a visceral sense of information's contemporary
precedence as a way of understanding the world, a physical/symbolic
palimpsest of self-propelled exchange, the universe itself as the ultimate
analytical engine. If Borges's "Library of Babel" is literature's iconic
cautionary tale about the extreme of informational overload, Gleick sees
the opposite, the world as an endlessly unfolding opportunity in which
"creatures of the information" may just recognize themselves.

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