An Inspiring Book with an Awful Title

So far, reading James Gleick's new book has been wonderful -- pictured at left, he is one of my favorite writers, for his clarity and thoughtfulness in explaining scientific topics.  However, the title of the book is horrible, and doesn't begin to explain his purpose -- The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood.  Gleick has set out to chronicle how information came to be the dominant cultural force of our times, beginning from the beginning and ending with today.  I have only read the first three chapters and the prologue, but those chapters are starting to change my thinking about reading and writing in this digital age.  The idea that talking drums in sub-Saharan Africa could convey messages in much the same way that the telegraph did, or that Mesopotamian cuneiform tablets (such as the one pictured at right) could contain algorithms for mathematical principles, and that these drums and forms have a connection to the bits and bytes that we exchange daily now, had honestly never occurred to me, and would never have occurred to me without reading this book.  The prologue explains that 1948 was a pivotal year, not just because the transistor was invented and named by Bell Labs, but also because the term "bit" was defined, by a Bell Lab mathematician/engineer named Claude Shannon.  Such nuggets are only beginning to form a picture of how information came to be a cultural currency, but I am enjoying the puzzle-piecing immensely.