It’s not only douchebags who say that the Internet changes everything. According to James Gleick, one of America’s most important and successful technology writers and the author of the major new book The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood, the Internet is as transformative as the invention of the printing press or writing.
“Cyberspace as a mode of being will never go away.” Gleick told me when he came into TechCrunch’s New York studio. “We live in cyberspace,” he added, explaining that it changes everything that we do.
But Gleick, in spite of his belief that the Internet is central to 21st century life, is too smart to fall into clichés about the digital revolution. No, he insisted, it isn’t wrecking our brains and making us stupid, even though it is drowning us in information. And no, he explained, it isn’t necessarily resulting in Sherry Turkle’s robotic moment – even if he is way too experienced a technology pundit to predict the future.
This is the second part of a two part interview with Gleick. Yesterday, he explained to me why we ARE information.
The History of Information and the Internet
Are We Drowning in Information?
The Future of Information
James Gleick was born in New York City in 1954. He graduated from Harvard College in 1976 and helped found Metropolis, an alternative weekly newspaper in Minneapolis. Then he worked for ten years as an editor and reporter for The New York Times. His first book, Chaos, was a National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize finalist and a national bestseller. He collaborated with the photographer Eliot Porter on Nature’s Chaos and with developers at Autodesk on Chaos: The Software. His...
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