The Story of Industrial Civilization: Information

Progress writer Jason Crawford is writing a book about the modern world and how it was invented. In a series of salons, we will explore this content together, chapter by chapter, and get an inside look at the author’s creative process.

Behind the world of our daily lives, there is a hidden world, one that keeps our world running. It is an industrial world, one of factories, engines, chemicals, and infrastructure, that most people rarely notice or appreciate. But every piece of it is a solution to a problem: a way to satisfy human needs in the face of nature’s constraints.

Session 7, Information:

We live in an Information Age. Just 200 years ago, no one could send a message faster than a piece of paper could physically travel. Today we can communicate with anyone—or access virtually the entirety of human knowledge, philosophy, art and culture—anytime, anywhere, instantly. And unlike some of the other areas we’ve looked at in this series, the field is still changing rapidly; some of the biggest breakthroughs are very recent. In this salon we’ll look at three major challenges of information—recording it, communicating it, and calculating with it—and how new ways of representing information give us new ways of solving them. Join us for an exploration of information technology, from cuneiform to the Internet.

Crawford will open the salon by talking about his research and writing on the topic so far, followed by discussion and Q&A.

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