The telephone, the fax machine, the calculator, and, ultimately, the computer are only the latest innovations devised for saving, manipulating, and communicating knowledge.” It is his idea that all these technologies exist as part of a continuum, with each developing from the last.

Over the course of human culture, there have been a number of significant transformations, beginning with the alphabet, which Gleick calls “a founding technology of information.

“We are the species,” he observes, “that named itself Homo sapiens, the one who knows - and then, after reflection, amended that to Homo sapiens sapiens.” Our self-consciousness, in other words - our awareness of our awareness - resides at the heart of our incessant need to process and to know. For Gleick, information has always been our medium since cave dwellers painted the first animal forms on their walls, we have existed in two parallel universes, the biosphere and the infosphere. The story of the telegraph is central to “The Information,” which is a wide-ranging, deeply researched and delightfully engaging history - going back to Homer and Socrates (who distrusted written language as a corruption of pure memory) and extending, in loosely chronological fashion, to our contemporary culture of downloads and data clouds - of how we have come to occupy a world defined in bits and bytes. “Because the telegraph was an information technology,” he posits, “it served as an agent of its own ascendency.”

“Some worried that the telegraph would be the death of newspapers,” Gleick writes, although “newspapers could not wait to put the technology to work.” All of a sudden, information was not just a tool but also a commodity. The telegraph, after all, changed everything when it was popularized in the 1840s by 1858, a transatlantic cable had put Britain’s Queen Victoria and President James Buchanan in direct contact, while news, gossip and commercial orders blazed across the wires. It was like the bursting of a dam whose presence had not even been known.” This was not a doubling or tripling of transmission speed it was a leap of many orders of magnitude. … Information that just two years earlier had taken days to arrive at its destination could now be there - anywhere - in seconds. “‘The transmission of thought, the vital impulse of matter.’ The excitement was global but the effects were local. “What was the essence of the achievement?” Gleick asks. Partway through “The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood,” James Gleick describes a technological innovation so transformative that it was heralded as “one of the grand way-marks in the onward and upward march of the human intellect” by the New York Times.

The Information by James Gleick