James Gleick: The Information March 16, 2011

Hosted by Brian Edwards-Tiekert

"A tour de force... This is intellectual history of tremendous verve, insight, and significance. Unfailingly spirited, often poetic, Gleick recharges our astonishment over the complexity and resonance of the digital sphere..." - Booklist, Donna Seaman

James Gleick brings us his crowning work: a revelatory chronicle that shows how information has become the modern era's defining quality-the blood, the fuel, the vital principle of our world.

The story of information begins in a time profoundly unlike our own, when every thought and utterance vanished as soon as it was born. From the invention of scripts and alphabets to the long misunderstood "talking drums" of Africa, Gleick tells the story of information technologies that changed the very nature of human consciousness. He provides portraits of the key figures contributing to the development of our modern understanding of information: Charles Babbage, the indiosyncratic inventor of the first great mechanical computer; Ada Byron, the poet's brilliant and doomed daughter, who became the first true programmer; and Claude Shannon, the creator of information theory itself.

And then the information age comes upon us. Citizens of this world become experts willy-nilly; aficionados of bits and bytes. And sometimes feel they are drowning, swept by a deluge of signs and signals, news and images, blogs and tweets. The Information is the story of how we got here and where we are heading.

James Gleick's first book, Chaos, was a National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize finalist. With photographer Eliot Porter he produced Nature's Chaos, and with developers at Autodesk, Chaos, The Software. His other books include Genius, The Life and Science of Richard Feynman and Isaac Newton, Faster, and What Just Happened.

$12 advance tickets: 800-838-3006
or: Pegasus Books (3 locations), Mrs. Dalloway's, Moe's Books, Walden Pond, DIESEL, A Bookstore, and Modern Times ($15 door)

Official Website: http://www.kpfa.org/events