say, okay, i just want to be known as toure because that's the name that's meaningful to me, it was chosen for me. the last name is a slave name. not only that disruption, but, you know, it's the name that we know nothing about. my father's father died before he was born, so we have no photographs. they all burned in a fire long before i came around. you know, we have no stories. you know, we don't know much about him, 10, you know, there's -- so, you know, there's a double disruption, a double dislocation for that part of my name, so i wanted to choose the name that my parents chose for me that has meaning, that has some connection to africa opposed to the slave name we know nothing about, that paternal lineage, and when i got to college, i had the freedom because i was the only one there. my sister was not there at the time, and my parents were not around, so i could introduce

myself as toure, and everything that i wrote when i started writing, when i was in complej, everything that i ever wrote was just published as tour youe. .. byline. >> host: this is your most recent book. this is your third book? >> guest: fourth. >> host: fourth book? how did your journalism career begin? >> guest: um, i was working on the fire this time, the newspaper i founded at emery, at column, and i had occasion to call somebody at "rolling stone" for some reason to ask them some question. and i talked to the perp for a long time, and i said, well, who are you to have this time to sit on the phone and talk to me, thank you so much. and the person said, well, i'm an intern. and i'm like, they have interns at "rolling stone"? this is amazing, i want to be an intern. so i applied, and i got an

internship at "rolling stone," started going there all the time. quickly realized that we are just here to be a free labor force. you're not teaching us anything. so i started to not do the things that they told me to do. i would delegate to the other interns the tasks that were delegatedded to me which completely, you know, was not appropriate at all, not at all what i suggest interns do, but that gave me pockets of time to go around to the writers and editors and say how do you become a writer? i got fired, but i made a relationship which allowed me to get an assignment for the magazine. and from there i was able to start writing for "rolling stone" and slowly for other magazines and newspapers and start to create a career. >> host: next call for toure comes from holly -- haley in columbus, ohio. haley, good afternoon. you're on booktv on c-span2. >> caller: hi there, it's halle. >> guest: hi, halle.

>> guest: i wanted to talk to you about the issue of the n word. i was raised in the farmland of ohio. my mother was a widow, and there was one word that you couldn't say. you could get away with quite a few words, but the n word was a word that just had no place. and in fremont, ohio, there were very few black families, and it wasn't really until junior high school and in your school experiences that you met black families. and you had good relationships with people. so this would have been in the 'of 0s -- '60s. and most of our experiences with the assassinations and the riots, these were things that we saw, and that was our black history education, and it was assassinations, it was riots, it was things happening that were way beyond your imagination. and, i mean, my little farm town

was surrounded by pumpkins and corn, and it just wasn't anything that you knew to have that kind of hostility and that kind of anger. and the n word wasn't spoken in the school. and it wasn't spoken among your friends. and i went on to column at bowling green and the university of toledo, and the people that i met there, diversity, and no need for the n word there. >> host: so, halle, we're running out of time. get to the point. we're running out of time. >> caller: the n word just didn't have a place. and at one point someone said every word that's spoken on the television is broadcast forever into the heavens. and i would hate to think that that word goes out. and if it's among --

>> host: halle, we're going to have to leave it there. i'm sorry. >> guest: i think you're making an excellent point, and, you know, i think you were raised right to be taught don't use the word nigger. it's not appropriate in almost any situation that you would ever encounter. but when you're talking about the anger, i think there is a tremendous anger at america and american history, and much of the american present in a lot of black people. and i think that's what the word comes from, it's a -- it is definitely related to our anger with america and our anger at the way that we have been portrayed by america throughout its time. we have been treated and looked at a lot of the time as monsters, and that sense is trapped, is locked up in that word. and for many people it's a sense of we have reclaimed the word, and we use it in a sense of love and that, you know, you are close to me, you know, but it's definitely located in you are in the oppression zone with me, my

brother, my nigger. .. young white boys are using the word they are risking very live who will over here you, to take matters into their own hands. >> host: this week from brian

faust. any of the people you interview in this book disagree with your premise? >> guest: absolutely. people disagreed with the premise. some of that sense is in the book. you didn't want to be too much attacking my own conception and my own thesis but there is definite push back against the concept by very smart people whose opinions i respect and i had to learn -- how to deal with their descent. >> host: next call from toure from a leak in illinois. you are on booktv on c-span2 with toure. >> caller: how are you, sir? you are the epitome of what black is. you are smart and erudite and intelligent. you said earlier you can teach a black person to be black. you can't teach a black person to be black. is like teaching an eagle how to flaw. you are what we are.

a person who talks very negative grammar doesn't make some black. that makes them ignorant. you put a black person in a learning environment, wood associate him with white because he speaks correctly? no. the word bigger --nigger has nothing to do with being black. we put that connection that it is black. so the word -- people call me is that all the time but dino i am not lazy or lethargic. you are the man. of the, brother. thank you for your work. >> guest: the one thing that i would say is identity is learned. each human being learns identity. you are exposed by all the teachers around the, parents or

friends, schoolteacher's about what it means to be you. sociologists talk about the looking glass shelf and you cannot help but look at yourself by the way the world looks at you and when the world looks at you as a black person as various ways the world looks at you, you have to deal with those perceptions coming at you as well as the way you look at yourself. my parents taught me that being black -- ernie barnes and ed bradley and on and on. malcolm x and dr. king and james baldwin and turning morrison. this is the message on i am receiving about what it means to be black as well as what is going on with my family members. they're teaching me what it means to be black. i think everybody is learning how to be black from all the people and the media around them and you take an identity for the

things you love the most out of the things you receive. >> host: we are live from miami with toure at miami book fair. boston tweets and i apply what i learned from you about racism to the latino experience in this country. is that ok with you? >> that is absolutely okay with me. i am dealing with a moment of liberation. you can choose the way that you want to perform within your own identity group and i have heard from latinos and jewish people that this model of thinking is applicable to other raises and ethnicities and that is absolutely true. >> host: margie in west virginia, you are the last call today. >> caller: i really enjoy you on bill madigan. i would like to get your perspective. i hate racism of all types. i wonder how you view the term white trash and trailer trash

and how that should be discussed in the media and one final question, the gentleman who called you from iowa complemented you, you deserve being i think he said an intelligent black man but i want to distinguish the view of an intelligent man. can we get somewhere in this country where i can just view you as a human being and we can all view each other as human beings and not have to put identification of the are a smart black man but you are just a smart man? >> caller: i appreciate that. i hate racism as well. we all do. when the brothers says you are a smart black man it is a little bit of an extra complement from black person to black person that he is relating -- i take it as a complement. i don't take it is you don't see

me as human but as a black person. i am all about pride in who you are. i think that is a beautiful thing. i don't want race to be forgotten or washed away. i want race to be celebrated. something we should be proud of. black people, asian people and latino people have something to add to america and what america is all about. prejudice and judging people negatively because of the race they come from is what we want to get away from and we can have tried without prejudice. that is the goal we want to get to rather than the color blindness of this race line. that deals with -- put to you as a white trash -- obviously that is a complete derogatory term that doesn't get at the humanities at white people who are living in those situations actually have and we should not

discuss that with any seriousness because that is disrespectful to them as well. >> host: web site? >> guest: toure got, and i have a blogger on toure.at tightpat.com and follow me at twitter@davy crockett -- twitter@toure. >> host: the book. who is afraid of post blackness. the authors toure. he has joined us from the miami book fair to take your calls. coming up several hours of live coverage on our set on booktv on c-span2. from miami. several more authors coming up to talk about. if you are interested you can watch our web cast on line, booktv.org. we are webb casting several water events including toure. he will be speaking in half an hour. you will be able to watch him on

line as well. coming up next is the author of this book, james gleick called "the information". mr gleick sat down for booktv's afterwards program in may and talked to frank rhodes of wired magazine. we will show you that after words and that james gleick will show you -- know from miami to take your calls. >> fascinated by the year 1948. clearly there was a banner year to speak in terms of studying the states and the world we live in. that was the year the transistor was invented and year claude canning came up with information theory and cybernetics was published. what was at about that year? why did all these things come

together? >> that year is the starting point for my book because i started the middle. it is the pivotal moment. i think is rare we have -- we are able to pick one year and say this is the fulcrum around which the modern world has turned but i really believe in 1948 -- you named the two things that apparently come with a dental became out of bell labs in the same year as the transistor and the information theory. claude shannon is the central figure of my book. because of the starting point. in 1948 he published in the obscure technical journal of bell labs system two papers called a mathematical theory of

communication which became a book, the mathematical theory of communication. the first time among other things that anyone used the word that as a unit of measure for this stuff. information. but what was it? he would go around reminding people were telling people fat he was going to use this word in a scientific way and needed people to understand while it was related to the ordinary everyday sense of the word it was something different. he was going to make it something mathematical and quantitative. 1948 is not exactly the start of the information age but i would like to say it is the start of the time in which we begin to realize that all of human history had been an information age. >> host: how did he come up with

the term bit? >> guest: invented by statistician named don tooky who worked at princeton for many years. i interviewed him once because he was done roommate of richard feynman. he was a wonderful guy and there was a lot of discussion about not yet invented quantity. bit is short for binary digit and it is a nice little word that refers to something -- we know what it is. it is on or off, yes or no, true or false. that lies at the heart of so much of the computer era. that is due to shannon who wrote a master's thesis when he was barely 20 years old in which he was getting a degree in electrical engineering.

he wrote a thesis connecting the analysis of electrical circuits with george bull's symbolic logic from the nineteenth century. these were two ideas that seemed to any normal person is so distant from one another. in having different planes of existence. electrical circuits. most people who are electrical engineers were doing things to do with hardware and current and resistance. claude shannon was thinking in a completely abstract way where a circus could be on or off and made this connection that on or off could be the same is true or false and you could link circuits together and have a logic. you could have if, then. all this affects the destination to as if we know anything about computers because computers are built on this. this equivalence between circuitry and logic. this is where it was invented.

so the bit is the fundamental unit. the binary digit. >> host: we know a lot about william shockley. he has been quite a notorious figure. we know much less about claude shannon. in the popular imagination. tell me, what was he like as a person back then? >> guest: he was something of a loner. he was shy. bell labs at that time had a big bold industrial building on west street. the building is still there in downtown new york on the edge of greenwich village and on the other side. it is a collective right now or something like that. in the old pictures you can see the railroad lines running for the lower stories of the buildings. >> host: i love that picture. >> guest: right around the time

just after the war most of bell labs moved to the suburbs of new jersey to murray hill and claude shannon who officially work for the mathematics department stayed behind on his own in our cubbyholes and -- >> host: did he have a window? >> guest: i don't know. he was flirting with a young woman who works across the street during the war. the old nabisco building that they called the cracker factory and a microwave research group. he later married this woman. this was betty shannon. because during the war he had done important and useful work. he worked on cryptography especially and because bell labs was a really unique institution where they believe in the value of pure research, because of these two things people left

claude shannon alone. his managers didn't know what he was working on but he was allowed to do what he was doing and what he was doing was apparently not particularly useful. unlike the transistor. the transistor, everybody knew was going to be a big deal and when it was announced that same year you mentioned shockley, and his two co-workers, became immediately famous. bell labs, press release. the transistor we now go replaced those bulky, hot vacuum tubes and enabled the miniaturization of electronics almost immediately. there were transistor radios and then combined with the technology, the integrated circuit it became the underpinning of our computer world. now we have billions of

transistors literally in our pockets. i could pull my device out of my pocket. that is billions of transistors right there. shannon's theory which came out at the same time at first blush had nothing to do with that. it was a coincidence. he was thinking at least officially about telephone wires, old copper analog telephone wires and his theory of communication was of great use in coming up with techniques for compressing information and sending it efficiently over these analogues wires in the presence of voice but while he saw a lot of these problems in an analog whey he simultaneously solve them and the digital way meaning not just sign waves where everything is continuous bad in terms of what we now call

bits. that is where it is broken up to a degree and it is digital. in our world, that makes it suitable for storage on all kinds of new devices instead of just final photograph records. we have compact disks which store many times more bits because they are little microscopic pits engraved for a laser on a substrate of silicon or some other material. by solving these problems both in analog terms and in digital terms shannon made a great leap forward for science that was just in the process of being born which was computer science. >> live on your screen is james gleick who you just saw in fact afterwards interview. we are in miami and he is here

to take your calls. mr gleick legal in that interview with frank rhodes you talked about bell laboratories. can you quickly give us a history of bell labs and their importance when it comes to information and information technology? >> guest: in american science in general, is a were a wonderful institution that unfortunately is starting to disappear or almost finished disappearing. they were a corporate research lab. they started as a company math department in the yearly 1900s and they grew very quickly to be a tremendous research facility first in new york city and in new jersey at several locations that did not just for research the company's corporate mission which was the telephone network, electrical engineering research but also research into pure

science. they won nobel prizes in astrophysics for example. they were the laboratory where the transistor was invented and the transistor, if at&t charge a penny for everyone they would not own the planet. instead they loose it free upon the world. in our time unfortunately pure research at corporate labs has almost disappeared. some companies still do it. ibm has a great research lab which is not entirely directed to the bottom line. some of the newer computer companies are trying to their credit to create something like the old bell labs but i feel a little sentimental about it. not that i ever worked there. >> guest: what is information as you define it in your book?

>> guest: i tried to resist ever giving it a single definition. a critical moment in my book comes when scientists at bell labs gave us for the first time a scientific information and it was an information that had to do with uncertainty and it had to do with surprise. a new bit of information is calable if it's something you didn't know before. in our time information mean something much bigger. we all know that. we throw the word around. we say it is a cliche that we live in the information age. we have been saying that for almost 50 years and when we say that i think we all have if not a definition at least a common understanding in our mind and that is something that includes news and gossip and conversation but also the written word and

television. the conversation we are having is generating information which is being stored in the form of bits and bytes in various electronic me and being broadcast live and henceforth from c-span's archives. all of these are information in different guyss. >> host: explain the cover of your book. let's get in close. "the information" by james gleick for route and it is written over and over as right in the center says a theory. hart senate office building 0 >> guest: that title is "the information: a history, a theory, a flood". it is a matter of case whether you think it is a good thing where it is not obvious from looking at the cover what the title and subtitle of my book are. i like the cover the very much. it was designed by peter

mendelssohn. won't treasury his mind that you can see some of what he had in mind. repeating the word over and over again. it says something about one of the scenes of libel which is the information you're looking for has a tendency to get lost amid the flood. >> host: james gleick is our guest. 624-1111 in the east and central time zone. if you'd like to call in and talk to him. 624-1115 in the mountain and specific times and then send a tweet to twitter.com/booktv. mr gleick is the author of several books. he has been a finalist for the national book award and a finalist for the pulitzer prize as well. do you have to be a scientist or mathematician john read and understand this book? >> guest: lord, no. i believe that a reasonably intelligent teenager can read my

book. i would say that but at least i hope that is true. i am not a scientist or mathematician myself. when i write about science and math and there is definitely science in this book but also part of this book that have nothing to do with science. when i write about science and math i approach it as a journalist. hy interview wise people and ask dumb questions and i do that until i finally feel i have some understanding of the subject myself. on the one hand i hope i am writing about the esoteric subjects in a way that is not just meant to explain them. i am not trying to popularize them but report with the news is and why they matter but on the other hand i can just write about amusing the jargon because i didn't know the jargon. >> host: who was claude shannon?

>> guest: the closest my book has to a hero. at least to a central figure. he was the mathematician and engineers at bell labs in 1948 who invented what is now called information theory. he set loose upon the world in a couple of technical articles in the bell labs system journal in 1948. never became a household name but became very famous in the field because information theory for the first time provided a sort of mathematical grounding for engineers who wanted not just to talk about information in an intelligent way but manipulate it, compress it so through telephone wires and broadcast through the airwaves. >> host: who were the other prominent figures in that era we should know about? >> guest: in that era there was

norbert wiener was an older contemporary of shannon. norbert wiener unlike shannon, in contrast to shannon -- she was on the cover of time magazine and life magazine. i don't know how well he is remembered today but he was a real sensation. he created the science of cybernetics. that was the title of his best-selling book. i try to tell the story of some other great thinkers from the 20th century. that is no. weiner. >> host: when you say he was well-known are we talking bill gates or steve jobs well known? >> guest: he was on the cover of time magazine. i don't think time magazine did man of the year than but he could have been if they had man of the year. so he was a celebrity, norbert

wiener, he was a child prodigy and he was associated with a thing that was happening that was suddenly important in popular culture and that was the birth of the digital computer. everybody was wondering, will these giant machines because they were giant machines weigh in the tens, ever be able to think and will take compete with us humans? to some extent rightly or wrongly he was the cumin face attached to that kind of speculation. >> host: first call for james gleick from san mateo, calif.. you are on the air. good afternoon. >> caller: hello. i am wondering if your hero had any intersection with another hero that i have been reading the book about named denise

hopper. she is also related to the information age and was a contemporary of claude shannon. have you heard of lynn hopper? >> guest: she doesn't make an appearance in my book. there were a lot of other really great computer pioneers in that era. i am only able to touch on the story of the birth of the digital computer. that is not my main focus but that is an exciting story in itself and that story in its own way lead to our time. >> host: herman in new york city. you are on booktv live from miami. james gleick is our guest. >> caller: good afternoon. thanks, mr gleick, for this volume. i can't reach treated.

i fairly enjoy the retrospective and awareness you are bringing to claude shannon. those of us not in the technical community, it is wonderful to hear his name finally uttered in the credence that he deserved. i would like to ask you during that year, alan turing was prominent not only in industrial laboratories but the military side. can you relate to information theory howard played in the beginning of the military-industrial complex and its support of the end of world war ii during world war ii and the cold war? >> guest: alan turing is a figure who plays an important role in my book because i said claude cannon was the central figure but he is just the middle of the story and alan turing is a step in a story that precedes

him. he was the endless mathematician who during the war became critical and secret role as a code breaker. he was the english hero who did more than anything else to crack the german a machine and it happened that after he did that great thing he came to bell labs while the war was still on on a kind of secret cryptographic mission and he met claude shannon over lunch in the cafeteria and they were both working, and cryptography and neither one could talk to the other about the project. they were not cleared for each other's project and they talked about things like what is the future of computing and what will it bring? they traded speculation on the future of thinking machines. i would give anything in our era

when every conversation is reported to have had the videotape of their conversation but it is lost to history. >> host: the importance of in the act? >> guest: another of these early computer machines, eniac. a lot of this history is associated with the american military and with american corporations because not just a coincidence that world war ii happened but the military application, military need for big number crunchers. another huge figure took place makes a cameo appearance in my book was john von lemon --nuyman who worked on the atomic bomb project but is remembered for his role in these origins of digital computing. >> host: we talked about bell labs and the fact that they are

essentially gone. what about microsoft's research or apple research for barbara --dar --darpa? >> guest: that is a government agency that provides funding for various kinds of research and i believe they still support a lot of interesting. surge -- research without her together operations. they have been under financial pressure along with the rest of the government funding of science in the last few years which i think is a tragedy. microsoft has the research group at apple has the research group. to some extent they have tried to finance york research without obvious application to the company bottom line. how successful they have that i cannot say. >> host: next call for mr gleick from mega in washington d.c..

>> caller: this is in that. [talking over each other] >> caller: the cross pollination of ideas. my father was on a team that invented synthetic rubber and new mr. winslow who was with bell labs. they were good friends so they shared ideas as a child. i don't know what they might have been but there was something about that encouraging environment of cross pollination of ideas. is there any sense of how at that time that was productive for both parties and both institutions? >> guest: that is a good point. i first set foot in the modern bell labs one covering science for the new york times and i used to walk down the hallways and things are looser in those days than they are now? they did have this curious think

they have now and i could walk in and talk to some of the mathematicians who were interested in juggling -- it was certainly true in shannon's era that he benefited from being able to talk to von nuyman like previously mentioned and the physicists investing and the transistor in the same era and shannon was a loner. would go off on his own and hide in his, the hole and ignore cross pollinization. that was important to him. it certainly still exists in great scientific institutions. it is not disappearing from the world. that is what universities are for if not corporate labs. >> host: which universities are doing the best research right now? >> guest: i don't want to make a list of the top universities.

their names are famous. besides the university's there are government institutions from which a lot of great research comes. >> host: mr gleick, we web cast a panel with you and author david sore bell has written a book about copernicus and that was live on booktv.org. why combine you with davidson bell? >> guest: they combined us because we both have to do with science and they thought that might be fun. i also think there is a connection. i was thinking this one i was sitting on the panel between copernicus and some of the issues i am writing about. there are more than one connection but there's one i will mention here. copernicus of course is famous for making it clear once and for all that the earth was not the

center of the universe. he established the heliocentric universe be personally heliocentric solar system we would say because now we know that the sun is not the center of the universe either but the earth goes around the sun and the sun is one of billions of stars or as carl sagan would say trillions of stars. this is part of the history of science that has continued for hundred of years in which for better or for worse we humans are less and less at the center of things. darwin also the leader in creating his theory of evolution, made it clear that the human species is just one of many. is now the be all and end all. we ask ourselves as i sometimes find myself doing why is the evolution a controversial or unpopular theory in certain quarters?

i think the deepest answer is there is a series that also, like copernicus's theory of the universe made it clear that humans are not everything. in a way, i hope i won't make information's sound like an unpopular subject for the same reason, the history of the science of informational some makes it clear that it is not all about humans. information has a life of its own. it is in some ways independent of us and precedes us. it is not just what we choose to exchange, you and i as one human to another but is also what exists in our dna. our dna is made of information. before there were human there were jeans and they were transmitting information across time. in other ways too, we have entered an era where we become aware of a thing called means which are little bits of

information that can be cliches or snippets of music which survive with us or without us. i would say that like copernicus, information scientists have created a less human centered world. >> host: we are talking with author james gleick about his most recent book "the information". in el paso, you are on booktv. go ahead with your question. >> caller: thank you to c-span. i have a question for mr. gleick. i think you alluded to the eniac a few minutes ago. can you comment on how the eniac has had a role to play in the 1948 time frame you are talking about with all these other things that led to eniac in your opinion? >> guest: eniac was one of the early difficult computers. you have to imagine a giant room

filled with thousands of vacuum tubes that would eat up and burn out in contrast to today's computers that run purely on silicon. in some ways it was the beginning of a story that led to smaller and more powerful computers and we know that story very well because we are living it and in other ways as you're suggesting, it was the end of another story. ancestors. you mentioned if i heard you correctly george school, the english logician in the nineteenth century to create a kind of symbolic logic. i have been talking about claude shannon who in a master's thesis when he was a very young man made a connection between the symbolic logic of george school and the electrical circuit. the connection, the insight that you could make a link between

on, off in an electrical circuit and true or false in an algebraic statement is as we all know now at the core of the modern world. it was -- lead to eniac and all are electronic devices. >> host: merriman in santa maria, calif.. you're on with arthur james gleick. >> caller: what a great interview. i am familiar with cds and flash drive. what will be the next device we will be familiar with for storing data. thank you very much. >> guest: i don't have any pipeline into the factories that are creating the devices. i have one in my pocket and you have one in your pocket but we all know what is happening is a movement away from the devices and into what we laughingly call the cloud. we are storing information not just on flash streisand cd roms

but also in this distant if the real place called the cloud that is not as abstract as it seems because it really exists as we know on giant server farms with stacks and stacks and room fulls and room fulls of servers sucking up electricity and generating waste heat. that is where our information is being stored in multiple copies. we hope redundant copies for safety. runs partly by large corporations like google and apple and amazon and in some ways it is more secure than ever before but in other ways it feels it is less secure than if we have that on a device in our pocket. >> host: you brought some plates up with that answer. let's start with the privacy issue. large corporations owning so much of our personal

information. >> guest: do they own it is the question. they possess it. they have copies of it. it is an open question whether as they own it. i don't think -- citizens of the digital world don't want to read it yet that they do. we need that to remain a battlefront. when we talk about privacy the thing to realize his privacy is not just about our disappearing, withdrawing, going into the forest like henry david thoreau and walden. we need to find ways to retain privacy while participating in the digital world. what i believe that this is regaining control over information about ourselves that appears to be more or less in position of these companies. blogging to be passed. at this point i would say europe

is in the lead and the u.s. is trailing behind. legislation about who does own information about us, if you go on a website and typed in surge terms google or your favorite search provider you know google is keeping a record which may be more or less associated with personal identifying information about you and your computer and where you are and what you search for yesterday. where you want google to retain that information and how you want google to use it in my view should be in part up to you. >> host: in that answer for marilyn you talked about fast amounts of electricity and spewing out of waste heat. we think of the ipad or the cellphone or the blackberry as a green invention rather than pages in a book. not so green?

>> guest: i do think it is fairly green. on the one hand gigantic amounts of a electricity are conserved in these farmers. the companies that run the mercy of about them for reasons that i think are hardly understandable. google is a gigantic consumer of electricity and -- but i don't want to criticize them for that because google search can serve as a lot of electricity. sometimes people in a joking kind of way try to measure the amount of electricity that is consumed by one surge on google and it is not zero. but it is possible to imagine that that surge -- search might save your trip to the library might have undertaken in an automobile using gasoline. in that case the google search suddenly looks like green

technology. >> host: we are talking with james gleick about the information. you can see the cover here. we will get in closer as we take this next call from audrey in michigan. you are on booktv. >> caller: hello. hello. high. thank you very much, mr gleick. congratulations on your newest information. i am curious to know what your theory is all about. i am interested because i have written two manuscripts. i am and up and coming writer and hope you could give me some information on some agents i could contact in order to get my information out there. >> guest: we should be having one on one conversation. the nature of this medium is such that i am speaking not just to you but quite a few other people and they themselves may not be interested in the identity of particular agents.

this might not be the best format for me to do it even if and it is a big if i thought i were the right person to recommend agents. >> host: 624-1111 in the east and central times of. 624-1115 mountain and pacific time zones. twitter.com/booktv. mike -- what do you think about the work of marshall mclouhand. >> guest: the irony of receiving a tweet asking about him and delivering an answering to a television camera almost leaves me breathless. marshall mclouhand as many of our listeners know one of the great profits of what he called the electrical age and we now call the information age. he called the electric kool-aid and the technology was thinking

of was television. he said so many things about our time that are as if he had a crystal ball and could see the internet coming. also some things that he didn't see coming. my book tries to appreciate him without treating him only as a profit. >> host: next call for james gleick from larry in north dakota. >> caller: great program and congratulations on your book, mr gleick. the printed book to me is an information delivery device like the book you are showing but so are the e readers, kindle and o no nook. yours is available from kendall on amazon. i like it better than the

printed text. those who are concerned about this in the information business, librarians and library. everyone is concerned in the information business about where this is going? what is going to happen down the road in terms of the readers, the book and the printed book? easy question, right? >> guest: certainly a question on my mind because i spent a lifetime making a living creating these things. i like a printed version but i read the books. all my books are available -- i hope in all the available formats. i don't favor any one platform over any other. even my first book, written in an era before he books have been released in the e book format and away that takes the vantage

of the medium. the e book of chaos has an atlas with and some video, visual illustrations of the scientific content that do some things i wish i could have done in the printed book. but i certainly share the concern of librarians and booksellers and anyone else who has a fondness for the old delivery format of the printed book which in so many ways is a beautiful and effective technology that is perfect for the purpose to which was intended. >> host: chaos, older boat was a finalist for the national book award. what is the premise of chaos? >> guest: chaos was about a new science, still a very active branch of science attempting to explore pieces of the universe that appear to be 5 orderly

treatment by traditional science. parts of the universe that included turbulence in fluid flows, that included erratic behavior of dynamic systems and everything from economic systems to the human heart arrhythmia. >> host: next call from mr. gleick from jerry in philadelphia. you are on booktv on c-span2. >> caller: thank you so much for that book. i enjoyed it. i want to expand on the "the information" -- eniac. as the university of pennsylvania, doctors lawfully and actor where the two professors of electrical engineering who put it together. the real question i have is every time i read information theory it was authored or co-authored by shannon and shaneo. is that your recollection? it was a long time ago. >> guest: robert shadow was a

student of shannon and the creator of considerable parts of the scientific framework that is now listed under the umbrella of information theory. he worked with shannon on something but the or regional paper that created the science of information theory were titled a mathematical theory of communication. they were just like claude shannon and published in a book that has never been out of print and that you cannot tie 7-still by the paperback by university press called the mathematical theory of communication by shannon and warren weaver. warren weaver created a readable sort of introduction that was originally a scientific american article. even though the book -- shannon's part is have mathematical and have equations

is fun for anyone interested in the subject. may be fun is an overstatement but it is interesting. >> host: we have sparked an interest in the eniac. why did that get so much attention? was it partially p r? were there other efforts similar to it going on? >> guest: this is the fourth question about the eniac computer. it was one in a sequence. in britain in secret there was a digital -- and electronic computer being created in connection with their decoding process and a variety of american companies and laboratories their grid digital computers being made and all of these were the ancestors of these devices that a few years ago i would have said we have on our desktops and now i have to say we have most likely in our pockets. you are running your finger across one right there. that is why we care so much about them. these are the grandfathers and

grandmothers of the machines that are with us today. >> host: next call from tucson, arizona. you are on booktv with james gleick. >> caller: this is a fascinating interview. your talk about bell labs could you talk on the work of cardigan and richie of bell labs? their development of the c programming language and the unix operating system upon which so much of the internet rests including the offshoots which is lennox upon which most of the other part of the internet is operating on? >> guest: it is true that this is another of the contributions of bell labs to the world. the unix operating system. whether you think that is a gift to the world or something less than a wonderful christmas present depends on how geeky you are i guess. the caller is absolutely right.

the unix operating system is alive and well and underpins a lot of our favorite operating systems today and it was free. it was another gift to the world that bell labs never made any money from. >> host: where would you put bill gates and steve jobs in the american information hall of fame? >> host: >> guest: bill gates and steve jobs are and where great entrepreneurs and business executives. each in his own waybill to great company. plays a gigantic role in our information landscape today. the people i focus on in my book tend to be more the intellectual pioneers. the people who created the ideas that underpin our modern world. going back in timesf