INFORMATION AGE:ONE MIGHT think that being singled out as the best in your field would be a source of unalloyed pleasure, but for James Gleick, the consensus view that he is the foremost science writer in the business sits somewhat uneasily with him. As the science fiction novelist and blogger Cory Doctorow put it, "Gleick is one of the great science writers of all time, and that is, in part, because he is a science biographer. Not a biographer of scientists . . . but a biographer of the idea itself."
Does the description fit? "I like that line, that was very flattering," says Gleick, slightly uncomfortable at the premise, as he puts it. "I never set out to be a science writer. For the first 10 years or so of my work life, I was just a journalist, I worked on the city desk at the New York Times, but I started writing more and more about science. I started writing magazine pieces, and one of them lead to a book, Chaos, and my next book was a biography of a physicist, Richard Feynman. But I'm still not completely sure I'm a science writer."
It is one of the few times Gleick speaks with any hesitation. In conversation, the writer of popular science books such as the surprise bestseller Chaos: Making a New Science, which popularised the notion of the Butterfly Effect, and this year's epic The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood,talks in a deliberate, considered manner. The words follow logically, as if his thoughts are sentence equations – a premise added to an observation equals an insight, or a question multiplied by a related question leads to a theory. Now in his late 50s, Gleick has a grey but expressive face, and he looks like a quintessential East Coast intellectual, wearing his intelligence clearly and lightly.
All that formidable intellect was required for the immense task of writing The Information, a vast and vastly ambitious examination of our species' relationship with information, from early alphabets and African talking drums to the pioneering work of Claude Shannon, the Bell Labs scientist who in 1948 invented information theory, the field of science that quantifies information itself and introduced the notion of the bit, a unit of information. It was Shannon's work that ultimately brought us to the juncture we now find ourselves at, overwhelmed by a torrent of information. If the challenge in popular science writing is to take complex ideas and build a narrative around them, then Gleick set himself one of the most daunting challenges of all with this topic – the book took seven years to research and write.
“It’s not meant to be a grab bag, it’s meant to be a single story,” he says, explaining the narrative thread that runs throughout. “Coding and codes are a theme that go from the beginning to the end; the African drums are a solution to the problem of encoding language in a form that’s suitable for transmission over distance, just as Morse Code was. And so before that was the invention of the alphabet. In our time, by no coincidence, computer programmers are called coders. So that’s one theme, but another had to do with what I took as a premise for organising the book, which is the core importance of information theory as a formal piece of mathematics. That begins in 1948, but it has consequences afterward and influences before, that I had to figure out.”
Despite the centrality of information theory to The Information, Gleick doesn't consider it a purely science book. "I'm not sure it belongs in the science section of the book store. I had this conversation with my publisher about how they were going to label it – there are some equations and math in it, there's a chapter on quantum-information science that was quite difficult for me, and I imagine quite difficult for some readers. On the other hand, there's a chapter on the telegraph that has no science in it, and a chapter on African talking drums.
“In our time, the interesting things are not the developments of the mathematics and the computer science, it’s more the cultural issues of how we are dealing with the flood of information. It’s more interesting for me to talk about Wikipedia than about quantum theory.”
As well as being a biographer of ideas, Gleick has written actual biographies of scientists – Isaac Newton and Feynman, the Nobel-prize winning US physicist who was as famous for his witty storytelling as he was for groundbreaking work in quantum physics. Was The Informationa way of shining a light on Claude Shannon?
"Shannon is not a household name, for sure, even now. In certain circles, in computer science or electrical engineering, Shannon is a god, the wellspring of everything that matters. The year he died, 2001, I wrote a piece about him for the Times' end-of-year magazine on notable people who died that year. I did Shannon because I thought he was somebody who deserved to be better known than he was, that he had more of an influence on the world we live in than was recognised. But even the most famous scientists are so obscure compared to, say, Charlie Sheen. When Richard Feynman died, the greatest physicist of his time, he wasn't a household name. I went to the page-one meeting at the New York Times, and they discussed whether or not to put his obituary on page one, and most of them had never heard of him. I had to make the case that he was worth page-one coverage. If a scientist gets a little publicity now and again, good on them."
If Shannon and his work constitutes the core of the book, then the cultural phenomenon that resulted from it – the flood of information that we’re now struggling to adjust to – permeates the conclusion.
“That ended up being the final point of the book, and I didn’t realise that until I was halfway through, I was a little slow to see that was the crucial thing. I focused on Shannon’s importance, but what happened after his work was that people objected to his having removed meaning from the engineering part of the equation. On the one hand, I can appreciate and almost celebrate why he needed to do that; he makes information into a measurable scientific quantity. That’s how it is in science. But then one recognises that all we humans care about is meaning. And the very issues that social scientists immediately raised as they tried to understand his theory . . . those are the same issues that affect us not just psychologically, coping with the flood and looking for meaning in the noise, but even from a practical point of view. It’s what Google has to do, the problem that Twitter has to solve.”
Before Google and Twitter were even a binary twinkle in their creators’ eyes, however, Gleick was himself involved in a tech start-up called the Pipeline, an early internet service provider which eventually made him very wealthy indeed.
“That was a fancy way of avoiding a book I was supposed to be working on, you know how creative a writer can be at that particular challenge. At that time I was living in New York city, I wanted access to the internet, it was a brief moment in time when scientists had internet access, and I was interviewing a lot of scientists, and they were asking if they could shoot a message over to me, and they couldn’t, I was cut off from this world. Suddenly the technology was there, and it was cheap, and I started this company to give people internet access,” he says.
Gleick and his business partner sold the Pipeline after a little more than a year for $10 million. “It was always my intention to get back to writing as quickly as possible,” he says wryly, as if such lucrative procrastination was a mere distraction from his more serious pursuits.
But with the Pipeline, Gleick was involved just as the internet was shaping up to change our lives, by literally piping more information than we ever had access to before into our homes. In his 1999 book, Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything, Gleick tackled how we were struggling with the increasing urgency of life in the technology age. It was, in some ways, a precursor to The Information.
“It’s almost as if in Faster, I was looking at the same issues, but I was looking at them the wrong way, from the wrong side of the window. I thought I was writing about speed but it turns out I was writing about information, and I was interested in all these technologies that accelerate our lives. By no coincidence they are mostly all information technologies.”
From alphabets and drums to smartphones and laptops, then, ours is a shared history of different technologies transmitting our profusion of information, the very substance of our interaction. The sheer flood of information can feel overwhelming, but Gleick has succeeded in adding a sense of perspective to the torrent.
