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
Basic dictionaries no longer belong on paper; the greatest, the 'Oxford English Dictionary,' has nimbly remade itself in cyberspace, where it has doubled in size and grown more timely and usable than ever.
I think we are always right to worry about damaging consequences of new technologies even as we are empowered by them. History suggests we should not panic nor be too sanguine about cool new gizmos. There's a delicate balance.
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.
A book is not necessarily made of paper. A book is not necessarily made to be read on a Kindle. A book is a collection of text, organized in one of a variety of ways. You could say that words printed on paper and bound between cloth covers will someday be obsolete. But if and when that day comes, there will still be a thing called books.
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 for memes, the word 'meme' is a cliche, which is to say it's already a meme. We all hear it all the time, and maybe we even have started to use it in ordinary speech. The man who invented it was Richard Dawkins, who was, not coincidentally, an evolutionary biologist. And he invented it as an analog for the gene.
Strangely enough, the linking of computers has taken place democratically, even anarchically. Its rules and habits are emerging in the open light, rather shall behind the closed doors of security agencies or corporate operations centers.
Novelists are in the business of constructing consciousness out of words, and that's what we all do, cradle to grave. The self is a story we tell.