Information, please

When was the Information Age - our age of Twitter, Facebook, and Google, of word processors and encyclopedias - born? a naive questioner asks James Gleick.

Gleick, whose new book The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood (Pantheon, $20.95) is a commanding chronicle of the information revolution, repeats the question, then pauses for a few moments to reflect.

It's such a "silly cliche, the Information Age," says Gleick, who will discuss his book Tuesday night at the Free Library of Philadelphia.

Still, the question opens up a vast labyrinth of ideas, historical events, and technological developments.

"All of human history has been about information," Gleick explains. "It's not an accident that we humans named our species homo sapiens" (loosely, "wise man").

From the cave paintings at Lascaux to papyrus scrolls to the printing press and DVDs, we have sought to understand and record our experience of the world. Our collective identity is constructed from information.

Information has been an important part of Gleick's life. Born in New York City and educated at Harvard University in English and linguistics, Gleick, 56, pursued a career as a journalist, most notably at the New York Times, before turning his hand to science books.

His books, which include Chaos: Making a New Science (1987) and the biographies Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman (1992) and Isaac Newton (2003), are celebrated for translating complex scientific ideas for the general reader.

Seven years in the making, The Information is his most ambitious project. And perhaps his magnum opus.

"It certainly feels like it's the book I've been trying to write all along," Gleick says on the phone from his home in Key West, Fla., where he lives when he's not in New York.

"It is, as you may have noticed, a very big topic, kind of a scarily big topic" to write about.

At more than 500 pages, The Information details the emergence of information theory and the parallel development of computer technology over the last six decades by following the lives and works of key scientists and theorists, most notably Claude E. Shannon and Alan Turing.

The book opens in 1948, when Shannon, then a young mathematician at Bell Labs, gave bit a new meaning.

We're more used to bytes, but it's the same idea: The bit, short for binary digit, is the smallest unit of information. It's a measure of anything that can be stored (in love poems, a Beethoven piano sonata, or in hard drives); transmitted (in whispered sweet nothings, by electricity over phone wires or by Twitter); or repeated (by a baby or a voice-activated computer).

One bit, Gleick explains, represents the amount of information in a simple yes-no, heads-or-tails, or on-off statement. (Byte, a term coined by IBM, equals eight bits.)

Shannon, who founded information theory, held that a desktop mechanical adding machine represents three bits, while the Encyclopedia Britannica holds one billion bits.

"The idea that there could be such a thing as information theory [that is as precise] as mathematical science, struck me as revelatory," says Gleick. The Information is at its most tantalizing when it addresses how information pervades human life at a level much deeper than addresses, books, or computer disks.

To a certain extent, it also is a history and theory of knowledge, taking on as it does thinkers from Plato and Aristotle to Charles Darwin, Kurt Gödel, and Albert Einstein.

Gleick touches on fields as diverse as physics, mathematics, cryptology, economics, cybernetics, and genetics, not to mention the history of encyclopedias and dictionaries.

For one thing, all living things - things with genes - are made up of information at their most basic level.

"We all talk about the genetic code," he says. "Code, when you think about it, is a funny word [to use]. It's all about cryptography and telegraphs."

Molecular biology, Gleick says, has shown us that information is "the fundamental building blocks of life itself."

Citing physicist John Archibald Wheeler, Gleick also suggests that at its most basic level, matter is organized by information processes. Information is not just a way to describe reality, it is reality.

So, it was information that begat neutrons and electrons, quarks and atoms? Is this science, or a religious myth? After all, in at least one telling, the cosmos was created through the transmission of the very first bit of information: "In the beginning was the Word." (John 1:1).

"[The physics] sounds a little mystical," Gleick admits.

Cosmology aside, have we drowned ourselves in information to the detriment of meaning?

"The science of information was developed by scientists who said meaning was irrelevant, and it didn't matter if the bits were Shakespeare's soliloquies or the chattering of chimpanzees," Gleick concedes.

He's troubled by that idea.

"We don't want a world in which the flood of information brings us reams of nonsense," he says, citing the mass of trivial information on cable news, gossip magazines, and the Web.

More seriously, he adds, rapid modes of communication have made it far too easy to disseminate false information, "mass hysteria, crazy fads, and fast-spreading misconceptions."

But the positive far outweighs the negative, insists Gleick, a self-described optimist. Take Facebook: It helped antigovernment protesters organize in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya.

"For that matter the fall of the Berlin Wall a generation ago was very much about increased access . . . to information about how people lived in the West," he says.

To keep the nonsense at bay, Gleick says, "we must retain as much responsibility as ever, more than ever, to be smart consumers of information."

Our entire existence, it seems, depends on it.