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Loading... Glut: Mastering Information Through The Agesby Alex Wright
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. From Kenneth, 2008 Glut is certainly ambitious, covering as it does all of human evolutionary history. Wright seeks to put information handling into its genetic and social context. Not being an expert in either field, I’ll need to look a little further to see if it holds up scientifically. Wright covers the history of information management, from the earliest systems on clay to current issues around folksnonomies. As a sentimentalist I was glad to see Paul Otlet get his due- though sadly no mention of Suzanne Briet- and it was interesting to be introduced to the ideas of Ted Nelson. At times some of the coverage feels like side alleys, but on the whole there’s a coherent thread. Wright’s conclusion seems to be that the ‘old’ hierarchies can- perhaps should- coexist with the ‘new’ networks in a mutually strengtening relationship. This is something which appeals to me. It has been pointed out that Wright makes several errors (or assumptions if one is being generous…) and certainly there were points when I thought ‘that’s not so.’ But overall this is an interesting enough book making some interesting points. Didn't like the book.. Seems to me to be a mirror of Matthew Battle's "Library: An Unquiet History." Perhaps not the right time to be reading - and perhaps an unfair assessment after only 50 pages, but I'm returning it unread to the stacks. This is the "pop" version of information history, written by someone who read maybe one book on each topic he would cover, and generally not a scholarly book at that. There are much better works on information throughout history, and on the history of books and libraries. This might be ok if it's your first read in this area, but be forewarned that there are errors and shortcuts that more scholarly works will straighten out for you.
"Alex Wright has written a fascinating account of the history of our attempts to organize and manage information and one that hints at even bigger issues than the one he has chosen to address. ... [I]t conveys that truth that much of what is presented today as novel is, in fact, as old as the hills."
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"This stimulating book offers much opportunity to reflect on the nature and long history of information management as a damper to the panic or the elation we may variously feel as we face ever greater scales of information overload."-Nature
"Glut is a penetrating and highly entertaining meditation on our information age and its historical roots. Alex Wright argues that now is the time to take a hard look at how we have communicated with one another since coming down from the trees, because the way we organize knowledge determines much about how we live."-Los Angeles Times Book Review
"Glut is a readable romp through the history of information processing. Wright argues that advances in information technology have always sparked conflict between written and oral traditions."-New Scientist
"Glut defies classification. From Incan woven threads to Wikipedia, Alex Wright shows us that humans have been attempting to fix categories upon the world throughout history, and that organizing information is a fundamental part of what makes us human. Many books tell you how to organizing things-this one tells you why we do it."-Paul Ford, Associate Editor, Harper's Magazine
"Information technology is part of what makes us human, and its story is our own. In this masterfully written book, Alex Wright traces the roots of the IT Revolution deep into human prehistory, showing how our lives are intimately bound up with the 'escalating fugue' of information technology."-Louis Rosenfeld, coauthor of Information Architecture for the World Wide Web
"We have no idea how to handle the upcoming explosion of information. I found Alex Wright's quick, clear history of past methods for managing oceans of information to be a handy clue to where we are going. He introduces you to an ecosystem of information organizations far more complex and interesting than the mere 'search' tool."-Kevin Kelly, author of Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World
"This is a must-read for anybody who wants to understand where we've been and where we're going. A lucid, exciting book full of flashes of surprise about how we've done it all before: prehistoric beads as networking aids, third-century random access systems, seventh-century Irish monastic bloggers, eleventh-century multimedia, sixteenth-century hypertext. I wish I'd written it!"-James Burke, author of American Connections: The Founding Fathers Networked
The "information explosion" may seem like an acutely modern phenomenon, but we are not the first generation-or even the first species-to wrestle with the problem of information overload. Long before the advent of computers, human beings were collecting, storing, and organizing information: from Ice Age taxonomies to Sumerian archives, Greek libraries to Dark Age monasteries. Spanning disciplines from evolutionary theory and cultural anthropology to the history of books, libraries, and computer science, Alex Wright weaves an intriguing narrative that connects such seemingly far-flung topics as insect colonies, Stone Age jewelry, medieval monasteries, Renaissance encyclopedias, early computer networks, and the Internet. Finally, he pulls these threads together to reach a surprising conclusion, suggesting that the future of the information age may lie deep in our past.
(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:00 -0400)
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