James Gleick
James Gleick
James Gleickis an American author, historian of science, and sometime Internet pioneer whose work has chronicled the cultural impact of modern technology. Recognized for illuminating complex subjects through the techniques of narrative nonfiction, he has been called “one of the great science writers of all time.” Gleick's books include the international bestsellers Chaos: Making a New Science and The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood. Three of them have been Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalists; and The...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth1 August 1954
CountryUnited States of America
Humorists are using Twitter to tell jokes in an interesting way. It doesn't have to be profound, and it doesn't have to be earth-shaking, but it is transformative.
Patents have long served as a fundamental cog in the American machine, cherished in our national soul.
It's important with any new technology to try to pay conscious attention to what the drawbacks might be. We choose to multitask. Sometimes our choices aren't the wisest of choices, and we regret them, but they are our choices. I think it'd be wrong to think that they're automatically bad.
The ability to write and read books is one of the things that transformed us as a species.
Information theory began as a bridge from mathematics to electrical engineering and from there to computing.
We have met the Devil of Information Overload and his impish underlings, the computer virus, the busy signal, the dead link, and the PowerPoint presentation.
Information is not knowledge, and knowledge is not wisdom. Reading - even browsing - an old book can yield sustenance denied by a database search. Patience is a virtue, gluttony a sin.
Because everyone in the world has the power to edit, Wikipedia has long been plagued by the so-called edit war. This is like a house where the husband wants it warm and the wife wants it cool and they sneak back and forth adjusting the thermostat at cross purposes.
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.
I really don't think of myself as a science writer.
I'm trying to look at many, many things in modern life that I believe are going faster, and I'm trying to look at why they're going faster and what effect they have on us. We all know about FedEx and instant pudding, but it doesn't mean we've looked at all the consequences of our desire for speed.
Information is crucial to our biological substance - our genetic code is information. But before 1950, it was not obvious that inheritance had anything to do with code. And it was only after the invention of the telegraph that we understood that our nerves carry messages, just like wires.
In cyberspace, the Wikipedians never stop gathering: It's a continuous round-the-clock rolling workfest.
I'll cheerfully confess to spending a lot of time playing completely disgusting computer games that have no redeeming social value.