Ever feel like your brain is a browser with 400 tabs open? You aren’t alone. We’re basically drowning in data. Most of us blame the internet or our phones for this feeling, but James Gleick has a different story to tell. In his 2011 masterpiece, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood, he argues that we've always been an information-obsessed species. We just didn't have a word for it until recently.
It's a big book. 500-plus pages.
Honestly, it's one of those rare science books that reads like a thriller but makes you feel like you just earned a PhD in reality. Gleick doesn't just talk about computers. He starts with talking drums in Africa and ends with the heat death of the universe.
The Information: Why Bits Matter More Than Atoms
You've probably heard the phrase "Information Age." We use it so much it has basically lost all meaning. But Gleick takes us back to when the idea of "information" as a physical thing—something you could measure, like weight or height—was radical.
The hero of the book is a guy named Claude Shannon. If you haven't heard of him, that’s a tragedy. Shannon was a Bell Labs tinkerer who, in 1948, published a paper that basically invented the world we live in. He was the one who realized that information is independent of the medium. Whether it’s a smoke signal, a telegraph pulse, or a stream of photons in a fiber-optic cable, it’s all just "bits."
Shannon’s big insight was sorta counterintuitive. He argued that information is not meaning. Wait, what?
To a mathematician like Shannon, the "meaning" of a message is irrelevant. If I send you a text saying "I love you" or "Buy milk," the amount of information depends on how unexpected the message is, not how much it makes your heart flutter. This is why The Information by James Gleick is so mind-bending. It forces you to look at the world as a series of probabilities and code.
The Drumming Telegraph of the Jungle
One of the coolest parts of the book is the beginning. Gleick tells the story of European explorers in the 19th century who were baffled by African talking drums. They’d be in a remote village, and suddenly everyone would know that a boat was arriving miles away.
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The Europeans thought it was magic or "primitive instinct."
Nope. It was a sophisticated system of high and low tones that mimicked human speech. Because the drums couldn't capture the full nuance of vowels and consonants, the drummers used redundancy. They wouldn't just say "wife." They’d say "the woman who is the mother of the children in the house."
This redundancy is exactly how your Wi-Fi works today. When a packet of data gets lost or "noisy," the system uses extra bits to fill in the gaps. We’re still using the same logic as those drummers from centuries ago.
A Who’s Who of Intellectual Giants
Gleick is basically the best biographer of ideas alive. He doesn't just give you a dry timeline. He gives you the people.
- Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace: The grumpy Victorian inventor and the brilliant daughter of Lord Byron. They tried to build a mechanical computer made of brass gears and steam. It never quite worked, but Lovelace saw what Babbage didn't: that a machine could process anything—music, art, logic—if it could be turned into numbers.
- Samuel Morse: The man who gave us the first real "high-speed" network. Before the telegraph, information traveled at the speed of a horse. After Morse, it traveled at the speed of light.
- Alan Turing: The tragic genius who cracked the Enigma code and gave us the theoretical blueprint for the "Universal Machine."
- Richard Dawkins: Gleick dives into biology, too. He explains how DNA isn't just "stuff"—it's a code. Your body is a biological machine executing an information program that has been running for billions of years.
The Library of Babel and the "Flood"
The last third of the book gets a bit dark. It’s the "Flood" part of the subtitle.
Gleick references Jorge Luis Borges’ famous story, The Library of Babel, which imagines a library containing every possible book. Most are gibberish. Because the library contains everything, it is also useless. You can’t find the truth because it’s buried under a mountain of lies and nonsense.
Sound familiar?
He wrote this before the current AI explosion, but his warnings about information overload feel like they were written yesterday. We aren't just consumers of information anymore; we’re victims of it. When information becomes too cheap to produce, the "signal-to-noise ratio" collapses.
What You Can Actually Do With This Knowledge
So, you read the book. Or you read this. Now what?
Understanding information theory isn't just for nerds. It changes how you interact with the world. Here are a few ways to apply Gleick’s insights to your actual life:
- Audit Your Signal-to-Noise Ratio: If your social media feed is 90% "noise" (ads, rage-bait, memes) and 10% "signal" (actual news, things that matter), you are experiencing high entropy. Start "compressing" your inputs. Unfollow the noise.
- Respect Redundancy: When you’re giving a presentation or writing an important email, don’t just say it once. Use the "talking drum" method. Repeat the core message in different ways to ensure the "bits" actually land.
- Think in Bits, Not Just Atoms: Realize that your digital footprint is as real as your physical one. In the 21st century, you are essentially a collection of data. Manage that data with the same care you’d manage your health.
- Embrace the Dictionary: Gleick spends a whole chapter on the invention of the dictionary. It was the first tool for "standardizing" information. If you want to communicate better, be precise with your words. Ambiguity is just another form of noise.
The Information is a tough climb in some chapters—the math and the quantum physics bits can get hairy—but it’s worth the effort. It’s the history of us. It’s the story of how we learned to talk to each other across time and space.
If you want to understand why the world feels so chaotic right now, stop looking at the news for a second. Read Gleick. He’ll show you that the "flood" isn't new; we've just finally built a boat big enough to notice we're in the middle of the ocean.
To get the most out of these concepts, start by identifying one major source of "noise" in your daily routine—whether it's an unorganized inbox or a cluttered desktop—and apply a "compression" strategy to simplify it. Focus on the core signal that actually helps you achieve your goals. This shift in perspective, moving from seeing data as a burden to seeing it as a measurable resource, is the first step in mastering the modern age.