Information History

An explosive inside look into the highly-planned and well-funded global propaganda campaign to delegitimize Israel and sow the seeds of antisemitism in the aftermath of October 7th. October 7th, 2023 was a truly horrific day—a day in which Israeli men, women, and children were slaughtered or...

John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid show us how to look beyond mere information to the social context that creates and gives meaning to it. Arguing elegantly for the important role that human sociability plays, even - perhaps especially - in the digital world, The Social Life of Information gives us an optimistic look beyond the simplicities of information and individuals.

In 1854, the American entrepreneur Cyrus Field set out to lay a 2,000-mile telegraph cable across the Atlantic. Nothing like it had ever been attempted, and Field knew nothing about electricity, telegraphy, ships, or oceans. But he believed that wiring the world for near-instantaneous communication would bring about peace on Earth. After enduring years of global scorn, catastrophic failures, staggering losses, and brushes with death, Field would finally lay his great cable in 1866 and usher in the global information age as we know it.

The volumes of data we now access can give unparalleled abilities to make predictions, respond to customer demand, and solve problems. But Big Brother’s shadow hovers over it. Although big data can set us free and enhance our lives, it has the potential to create an underclass and a totalitarian state. With big data ever present, you can’t afford to ignore it. In this book, acclaimed science writer Brian Clegg - a habitual early adopter of new technology - brings big data to life.

Libraries are much more than mere collections of volumes. The best are magical, fabled places whose fame has become part of the cultural wealth they are designed to preserve. The Library is a celebration of books as objects, a celebration of the anthropology and physicality of books and bookish space, and an account of the human side of these hallowed spaces by a leading and passionate bibliophile.

We’re often told that disinformation is everywhere and that it’s endangering our democracy. But what if the war on disinformation itself is really just a weapon to squash any and all legitimate dissent? The Information State is an incisive examination of how we reached the point where...

Here’s some of what just happened: Millions of ordinary, sensible people came into possession of computers. These machines had wondrous powers, yet made unexpected demands on their owners. Telephones broke free of the chains that had shackled them to bedside tables and office desks. No one was...

New York Times bestselling author reveals the FBI’s most closely guarded secrets, with an insider look at the bureau’s inner workings and intelligence investigations. Based on inside access and hundreds of interviews with federal agents, the book presents an unprecedented, authoritative...

Each of us has an ever-growing collection of personal digital data: documents, photographs, PowerPoint presentations, videos, music, emails, and texts sent and received. To access any of this, we have to find it. The ease (or difficulty) of finding something depends on how we organize our digital stuff.

Horace Everett Hooper - a volatile, self-assured, impulsive, and optimistic American, an autodidact and natural-born salesman - got into the book business at age 16, moved to the Western frontier and on to Chicago, and became hugely successful. With a brilliant adman named Henry Haxton as his partner, he went about buying publishing rights to the Encyclopedia Britannica, a work incredibly distinguished by entries from Charles Darwin, Thomas Malthus, Sir Walter Scott, and more.

A New York Times Book Review Notable Book of 2017 One of the best books of the year by The New York Times, LA Times, and NPR Franklin Foer reveals the existential threat posed by big tech, and in his brilliant polemic gives us the toolkit to fight their pervasive influence. Over the past few...

The Zondervan Biblical and Theological Lectures series provides a unique audio learning experience. Unlike a traditional audiobook's direct narration of a book's text, Obadiah: Audio Lectures include high quality live-recordings of college-level lectures that cover the important points from each...

Today, nearly one million books are published each year. But is the era of the book as we know it - a codex of bound pages - coming to an end? And if it is, should we celebrate its demise and the creation of a democratic digital future, or mourn an irreplaceable loss?

A landmark insider’s tour of how social media affects our decision-making and shapes our world in ways both useful and dangerous, with critical ideas on how to protect ourselves in the 2020 election and beyond MIT professor Sinan Aral isn’t only one of the world’s leading experts on...

In Art as Information Ecology, Jason A. Hoelscher offers not only an information theory of art but an aesthetic theory of information. Applying close readings of the information theories of Claude Shannon and Gilbert Simondon to 1960s American art, Hoelscher proposes that art is information in its aesthetic or indeterminate mode—information oriented less toward answers and resolvability than toward questions, irresolvability, and sustained difference. In this way, art constitutes information that remains in formation---a difference that makes a difference that keeps on differencing.

This book delves into all the conflicts in the war, including Germany’s disastrous invasion of Russia, the air raids that decimated much of London, and why the US started communicating in the Navajo language.

Embark on a journey like no other. The Camino de Santiago, or the Way of St James, is one of the most famous pilgrimage routes in the world. Leading to the shrine of St James in Spain’s Santiago de Compostela, this historic journey has been undertaken by millions of people from all walks of...

“Three lessons are interwoven throughout the historical case studies of information operations during large-scale combatis the information regardless of the capabilities employed to effect it; 2. successful information operations are operations integrated, synchronized, resourced and commander-led from inception to execution; and 3. information operations are, at their core, adversary/enemy-focused operations conducted to gain a relative advantage for friendly decision-makers…

In this book, Lamdan contends that privatization and tech exceptionalism have prevented us from creating effective legal regulation. This, in turn, has allowed oversized information oligopolies to coalesce. In addition to specific legal and market-based solutions, Lamdan calls for treating information like a public good and creating digital infrastructure that supports our democratic ideals.

Andrew J. Stewart convincingly shows that emergency software patches and new security products cannot provide the solution to threats such as computer hacking, viruses, software vulnerabilities, and electronic spying. Profound underlying structural problems must first be understood, confronted, and then addressed.