Reviews
Grand intellectual history... What Hobart and Schiffman have achieved through this cheery analysis is one of the more decisive refutations of the various 'End of History' arguments that have been floated over the past fifteen years. Information 'ages,' they pun, but history lives forever.
Far reaching and eloquent... Hobart and Schiffman follow the dreams, trials, and successes of such innovators as Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Galileo, Turing, and von Neumann as they took advantage of three distinct ages of information.
This is a most interesting book... the sort of book that will be read again and again.
Extraordinarily timely in every sense of the word. There is no work available to my knowledge that summarizes so succinctly the relations between knowledge and its media over the entire span of human history.
Creates an important, wide-ranging perspective from which to view our current computer age. It is at once accurate, clear, and provocative.
Book Details
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Information Past and Present
Part I: The Classical Age of Literacy
Chapter 1. Orality and the Problem of Memory
Chapter 2. Early Literacy and List Making
Chapter 3
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Information Past and Present
Part I: The Classical Age of Literacy
Chapter 1. Orality and the Problem of Memory
Chapter 2. Early Literacy and List Making
Chapter 3. Alphabetic Literacy and the Science of Classification
Part II: The Modern Age of Numeracy
Chapter 4. Printing and the Rupture of Classification
Chapter 5. Numeracy, Analysis, and the Reintegration of Knowledge
Chapter 6. The Analytical World Map
Part III: The Contemporary Age of Computers
Chapter 7. Analysis Uprooted
Chapter 8. The Realm of Pure Technique
Chapter 9. Information Play
Conclusion: The Two Cultures and the Arrow of Time
Notes
Bibliographical Essay
Index