Inquiry: JAMES GLEICK: The Information: A History. A Theory. A Flood.

Today we often talk about the exhaustion, the surfeit and the pressure from the vast amount of electronic and digital information that is always swirling around us. But it is important to keep in mind that this has all been seen before when inventions like the telegraph and telephone threatened to eliminate time and space in their ages. Tonight on Inquiry we welcome the leading chronicler of science and technology JAMES GLEICK. His new book THE INFORMATION: A HISTORY. A THEORY. A FLOOD is an amazing account of the evolution of information technology, from talking drums to print to computers and Twitter and Facebook. Tonight we focus on one small part of that history, but a critical one. Claude Shannon worked at Bell Labs in the 1940s as a cryptologist. From those studies he developed “a mathematical theory of communication” and was the first to use the term “a bit” to describe a piece of information.  His ideas changed communications technology forever.