Would you describe Claude Shannon, the man who invented the concept of the "bit" in 1948, as the hero of your new book, The Information?
Shannon is the central figure in the book but I didn't think of him as the hero, though I know what you mean. He created what we now call information theory - which, in my view, created the foundation for the age we live in. He did that by making information a scientific thing that can be measured in bits - by removing from the notion of information anything to do with meaning.
What was so significant about his work?
With it, we began to develop a truly new sense of the shape of information. "Information" used to be an unimportant word. It meant instruction or news. Now, it's an all-important word that we hear every day. And it became a cliché about a decade after Shannon's work that we were living in the "Information Age". There's a reason people started saying that. And the reason is that we have become aware of information as something we don't entirely own, that has a life apart from us as human beings.
In the book, you seem ambivalent about Shannon's indifference to the meaning of information.
Look, we don't have to take the view that he, as a human being, was indifferent to meaning. But you're right that there is a deep unease that runs through the book, not just about Shannon, but about this paradox. It's the central paradox that it confronts.
There's more than a passing connection between Shannon's removal of meaning from information in an attempt, for example, to solve problems of noise, and our sense that we are being flooded with data and overwhelmed by the noise. The problem for us is to find the meaning.
Do you think the science of information is, or could become, a theory of everything?
Information is the vital principle of our world, and I think that it is transforming all of these different sciences, including biology and theoretical physics, that at first blush do not appear to be about information, yet are very much about information. However, that doesn't mean we're going to produce a theory of everything where suddenly all problems are solved in a single, neat framework. That's not my view of
how knowledge works. I'm not a believer in neat frameworks.
Do you think the corporate research environment has changed since Shannon worked at the Bell Telephone Laboratories in New Jersey?
Definitely. In our era, Microsoft has attempted to create a research lab on the model of Bell Labs, but I don't think anything has come of it. Meanwhile, Bell Labs is a shadow of its former self. Corporations are more concerned these days about the bottom line, and they want to know, if they're spending $100,000 on a mathematician's salary, what he's doing for the money. That's really a shame. Because if the transistor hadn't been produced by Bell Labs in 1948, along with information theory, and let loose on the world free of charge, I think - without wishing to be a cyber-utopian about it - that we wouldn't be as well off today.
Are you optimistic or pessimistic about the changes that information technology is bringing about?
I find myself tilting towards the optimistic side, but without any great conviction. There are so many changes that cyberspace brings to everything: to our media, to the business of books, to the way we listen to music.
All of these things have a lot of excitement surrounding them, and a lot of worry. Here, I am riddled with ambivalence again. It's implausible to say that social networks such as Facebook and Twitter enabled the Egyptians to throw off a tyrant. But it is absolutely true that these information technologies played a part there, and continue to play a part.
Is the internet changing the way we think?
Of course it is. Everything changes the way we think. If we wake up in the morning and a tree falls 50 yards away, that changes the way we think. Our brains are plastic. Our consciousness is plastic. There's no question that a human being who knows how to tweet is a very different kind of creature from a human being who doesn't. l
Interview by Jonathan Derbyshire
James Gleick's "The Information: a History, a Theory, a Flood" is published by Fourth Estate (£25)
