Finished an interesting romp through the scientific and technological history of the representation and transmission of information, from talking drums to Wikipedia, with Claude Shannon's information theory taking the star turn. I appreciated that the author isn't afraid to look beyond hype and offer mild scepticism: on Norbert Wiener's more grandiose tendencies, or attempts to turn memetics into an academic field (also, any serious discussion of memes in a 2011 book is always going to read amusingly, given how the word has mutated). I'd be fascinated to know how Shannon, with his program for generating plausible (ish) English text, would have reacted to LLMs - the ultimate victory of 'information' over meaning? The author is active on Mastodon: @gleick . @bookstodon #bookstodon