How the Written Word Transformed Humanity

Complete video at: http://fora.tv/2011/05/19/James_Gleic...

James Gleick, author of The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood, explores the deep implications that the development of writing had on humanity. Despite opposition from great thinkers like Plato, the ability to write has made possible many things that we now take for granted.

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What do we know and when did we know it? Former New York Times writer James Gleick (the man who popularized "the butterfly effect" in Chaos) has produced the definitive history of the age in which we live, The Information. He talks with Robyn Williams. - Australian Broadcasting Corporation

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 next books include the best-selling biographies, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman and Isaac Newton, both shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize, as well as Faster and What Just Happened. They have been translated into twenty-five languages.

In 1989-90 he was the McGraw Distinguished Lecturer at Princeton University. For some years he wrote the Fast Forward column in the New York Times Magazine.

With Uday Ivatury, he founded The Pipeline, a pioneering New York City-based Internet service in 1993, and was its chairman and chief executive officer until 1995. He was the first editor of the Best American Science Writing series. He is active on the boards of the Authors Guild and the Key West Literary Seminar.