Let's Talk Information
In this, the Information Age, we carry a portal to an entire world of information in our pockets. If you happen to not carry around such a device, chances are that you have several other passports to this information destination at your local library, school, workplace, and your home. So why does it seem like it is harder than ever to discern good information from bad, reality from fantasy, and facts from lies?
Easy access to information comes with easy access to platforms for communicating information. Almost anyone is free to publish virtually anything on the internet. That is what makes the information age so fantastic, and so daunting to navigate. At a time when societies ought to be replete with well-informed citizens, it is only becoming more difficult to avoid misinformation.
To that end, here’s a reading list to launch your quest to become better informed about information.
"The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood," by James Gleick.
The story of information begins in a time profoundly unlike our own, when every thought and utterance vanishes as soon as it is 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.
"Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages," by Alex Wright.
What do primordial bacteria, medieval alchemists, and the World Wide Web have to do with each other? This fascinating exploration of how information systems emerge takes readers on a provocative journey through the history of the information age.
"Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now that the Facts aren't Facts, Experts are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room is the Room," by David Weinberger.
We used to know how to know. We got our answers from books or experts. We’d nail down the facts and move on. But in the Internet age, knowledge has moved onto networks. There’s more knowledge than ever, of course, but it’s different. Topics have no boundaries, and nobody agrees on anything. Yet this is the greatest time in history to be a knowledge seeker . . . if you know how.
"The Social Life of Information," by John Seely Brown.
For years pundits have predicted that information technology will obliterate everything, from supermarkets to business organizations to social life itself, but beaten down by info-glut, exasperated by computer crashes, and daunted by the dot com crash, individual users find it hard to get a fix on the true potential of the digital revolution.
"Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe," by George Dyson.
“It is possible to invent a single machine which can be used to compute any computable sequence,” twenty-four-year-old Alan Turing announced in 1936. In "Turing’s Cathedral," George Dyson focuses on a small group of men and women, led by John von Neumann at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, who built one of the first computers to realize Alan Turing’s vision of a Universal Machine.
"Information Doesn't Want to be Free: Laws for the Internet Age," by Cory Doctorow.
Can small artists still thrive in the Internet era? Can giant record labels avoid alienating their audiences? This is a book about the pitfalls and the opportunities that creative industries (and individuals) are confronting today — about how the old models have failed or found new footing, and about what might soon replace them.
"The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires," by Tim Wu.
In this age of an open Internet, it is easy to forget that every American information industry, beginning with the telephone, has eventually been taken captive by some ruthless monopoly or cartel. With all our media now traveling a single network, an unprecedented potential is building for centralized control over what Americans see and hear. Could history repeat itself with the next industrial consolidation?
"Blur: How to Know What's True in the Age of Information Overload," by Bill Kovach.
Amid the hand-wringing over the death of "true journalism" in the Internet Age—the din of bloggers, the echo chamber of Twitter, the predominance of Wikipedia—veteran journalists and media critics Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel have written a pragmatic, serious-minded guide to navigating the twenty-first century media terrain.
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