logo

Say thanks by supporting us!

Our website is made possible by displaying online advertisement to our visitors. Please consider supporting to us by disabling your ad blocker.

Processing...

Every new medium transforms the nature of human thought. In the long run, history is the story of information becoming aware of itself.

- James Gleick
logo
Author:
James Gleick
Tags:
Nature
History
Long
Related Quote
Show all

Children and scientists share an outlook on life. 'If I do this, what will happen?' is both the motto of the child at play and the defining refrain of the physical scientist.

A good part of 'The Information' is about the transition from an oral to a literary culture. Books effected such a great transformation in the way we think about the world, our history, our logic, mathematics, you name it. I think we would be greatly diminished as a people and as a culture if the book became obsolete.

Encyclopedias are finished. All encyclopedias combined, including the redoubtable Britannica, have already been surpassed by the exercise in groupthink known as Wikipedia.

Despite the metadata attached to each tweet, and despite trails of retweets and 'favorite' tweets, the Twitter corpus lacks the latticework of hyperlinks that makes Google's algorithms so potent. Twitter's famous hashtags - #sandyhook or #fiscalcliff or #girls - are the crudest sort of signposts, not much help for smart searching.

As the Earth continues to slow, leap seconds will grow more common. Eventually we will need one every year, and then even more. Scientists could have avoided these awkward skips by choosing instead to adjust the duration of the second itself. Who would notice? That is what they did, in fact, until 1955.

We choose mania over boredom every time.

At its most fundamental, information is a binary choice. In other words, a single bit of information is one yes-or-no choice.

Genes themselves are made of bits.

A bit, the smallest unit of information, the fundamental particle of information theory, is a choice, yes or no, on or off. It's a choice that you can embody in electrical circuits, and it is thanks to that that we have all this ubiquitous computing.

Showcase
Show all

Every new medium transforms the nature of human thought. In the long run, history is the story of information becoming aware of itself.

Every new medium transforms the nature of human thought. In the long run, history is the story of information becoming aware of itself.

Every new medium transforms the nature of human thought. In the long run, history is the story of information becoming aware of itself.

Every new medium transforms the nature of human thought. In the long run, history is the story of information becoming aware of itself.

Every new medium transforms the nature of human thought. In the long run, history is the story of information becoming aware of itself.

Every new medium transforms the nature of human thought. In the long run, history is the story of information becoming aware of itself.

Every new medium transforms the nature of human thought. In the long run, history is the story of information becoming aware of itself.

Every new medium transforms the nature of human thought. In the long run, history is the story of information becoming aware of itself.

Every new medium transforms the nature of human thought. In the long run, history is the story of information becoming aware of itself.

Every new medium transforms the nature of human thought. In the long run, history is the story of information becoming aware of itself.

Every new medium transforms the nature of human thought. In the long run, history is the story of information becoming aware of itself.

Every new medium transforms the nature of human thought. In the long run, history is the story of information becoming aware of itself.

Every new medium transforms the nature of human thought. In the long run, history is the story of information becoming aware of itself.

Every new medium transforms the nature of human thought. In the long run, history is the story of information becoming aware of itself.

Every new medium transforms the nature of human thought. In the long run, history is the story of information becoming aware of itself.