I just started reading this book (“The Information: A History. A Theory. A Flood.” By James Gleick. ) and it is fascinating.
“The universe, the 18th-century mathematician and philosopher Jean Le Rond d’Alembert said, “would only be one fact and one great truth for whoever knew how to embrace it from a single point of view.” James Gleick has such a perspective, and signals it in the first word of the title of his new book, “The Information,” using the definite article we usually reserve for totalities like the universe, the ether — and the Internet. Information, he argues, is more than just the contents of our overflowing libraries and Web servers. It is “the blood and the fuel, the vital principle” of the world. Human consciousness, society, life on earth, the cosmos — it’s bits all the way down.” NY Times Review
Not that these ideas are new, or new to me. I have stumbled across various thoughts along these lines over the past several years, perhaps as many as 10 years, but here it all is in a bold, wide-ranging 500+ page book. I’ve been in workshops where writers who work in memoir or journaling speak of ‘cellular memory.’ (Past-life evangelists like that idea, while others call it psuedo-scientific. Still, it’s an alluring concept. What if?) This book addresses the idea of DNA/RNA as memory.
The “Information Age” was announced as the next “revolution” along the lines of the Industrial Revolution. But that really only encompassed computing machinery, at least initially. Peter Drucker has an interesting take on the role of e-commerce in this Information Revolution (long, but a highly informative read). This book takes the idea of information way beyond computing, beyond the internet.
I’m looking forward to reading more of how these thoughts evolved for Gleik, maybe for all of us. I loved the section I read on the inventor/theorist who put forth the idea of the “bit”. I love the ‘fractals’ I see in the table of contents: the reflection of the human nervous system onto the globe (ch 5), “Life’s Own Code” (ch 10, the genetic information discussion) juxtaposed next to “Into the Meme Pool” (ch 11) …
Reading it? Let’s dialogue!
