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We live in a society that is awash with information, but few of us really understand what information is. In this Very Short Introduction, one of the world's leading authorities on the philosophy of information and on information ethics, Luciano Floridi, offers an illuminating exploration of information as it relates to both philosophy and science. He discusses the roots of the concept of information in mathematics and science, and considers the role of information in several fields, including biology. Floridi also discusses concepts such as "Infoglut" (too much information to process) and the emergence of an information society, and he addresses the nature of information as a communication process and its place as a physical phenomenon. Perhaps more important, he explores information's meaning and value, and ends by considering the broader social and ethical issues relating to information, including problems surrounding accessibility, privacy, ownership, copyright, and open source. This book helps us understand the true meaning of the concept and how it can be used to understand our world.
About the Series: Combining authority with wit, accessibility, and style, Very Short Introductions offer an introduction to some of life's most interesting topics. Written by experts for the newcomer, they demonstrate the finest contemporary thinking about the central problems and issues in hundreds of key topics, from philosophy to Freud, quantum theory to Islam.
- Sales Rank: #37799 in Books
- Published on: 2010-03-26
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 4.40" h x .60" w x 6.80" l, .28 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 160 pages
Review
Splendidly pellucid. Steven Poole, The Guardian
About the Author
Luciano Floridi is Professor of Philosophy and Ethics of Information at the University of Oxford, Senior Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, and Fellow of St Cross College, Oxford. Among his recognitions, he has been appointed the Gauss Professor by the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen, and is recipient of the APA's Barwise Prize, the IACAP's Covey Award, and the INSEIT's Weizenbaum Award. He is an AISB and BCS Fellow, Editor in Chief of Philosophy & Technology and of the Synthese Library, and was Chairman of EU Commission's 'Onlife' research group. His most recent books are: The Philosophy of Information (OUP, 2011), Information: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2010), and The Cambridge Handbook of Information and Computer Ethics (CUP, 2010).
Most helpful customer reviews
48 of 51 people found the following review helpful.
Groundbreaking and visionary, but very short indeed
By Irfan A. Alvi
Leaving aside the possibility of minds, souls, and the like, people used to think that the ultimate "stuff" of the universe is matter. Then thermodynamics matured during the 19th century, culminating with Einstein's theoretical demonstration that matter can be converted to energy, thus rendering energy apparently even more fundamental than matter. Now, as a result of multiple streams of developments during the 20th century, we live in an age when information is increasingly being viewed as the true ultimate stuff. This is at once both immensely stimulating and perplexing: stimulating because the concept of information has far greater interdisciplinary unifying power than any concept which came before, but perplexing because the concept of information is very abstract and thus elusively slippery.
In this book, Luciano Floridi clearly makes an earnest effort to navigate the difficult terrain presented by the manifold concept of information, and I think he does commendably well. The flow of the book makes sense. He sets the stage by describing how information-saturated our lives have become, to the point where we can be described as "inforgs" living in an "infosphere." He then looks at the concept of information by progressing through increasingly wider contexts: information as data, the mathematical theory of communication of data, semantic aspects of information, physical information (laws of thermodynamics, Maxwell's demon, etc.), biological information (a nicely nuanced discussion), economic information (emphasizing game theory and also touching on Bayes' theorem), a rather creative effort (even if not quite convincing) to reformulate ethical theory from an informational perspective, and finally an epilogue arguing for both the necessity and possibility of merging the natural and manmade worlds.
This broad scope properly reflects most of the key contempary perspectives on information. The follow-up question is whether this breadth comes at the expense of depth, and I think the answer is both yes and no. On one hand, Floridi writes at a fairly high level and thus manages to pack in a good bit of detail; this demands significant concentration by the reader and will make the book hard to follow for readers without at least a little background in the topics discussed. But on the other hand, I did find that the majority of the topics cried out for a much deeper treatment, to the extent that it was sometimes difficult to clearly grasp Floridi's key points because his discussion was simply too brief. In that sense, the book whets the appetite rather than serving up a full meal, so I'm tempted to deduct a star. But it can be argued that the book has fulfilled its mandate of providing a "very short introduction," so let's be generous and stick with 5 stars.
Since this book does a good job of introducing a fundamentally important topic in a groundbreaking and visionary way, and since I don't know of any better book for that purpose, I highly recommend it.
13 of 13 people found the following review helpful.
Comparing Floridi to Seife and Luenberger
By Let's Compare Options Preptorial
This great little book is a quickly readable survey of information science, with an emphasis on philosophy and ethics rather than problem solving or business. Two other extremes (not counting the dozen wonderful Dover titles on information theory for under $5 which are certainly worthwhile) include:
1. Luenberger: Information Science
David's book is about $90 US and our databases show it to be the most used IS textbook, even though it is a 2006 edition. In about 450 pages, it covers the practical applications as well as theory of the entire field of information science, from Shannon to smart phones and economics, minus the "wow how cool is IS" as well as the "we're drowning in info and can't get up" spins.
2. Seife: Decoding the Universe: How the New Science of Information Is Explaining Everything in the Cosmos, from Our Brains to Black Holes
Also from 2006, available used for a penny on some Amazon third party offers, 296 pages.
Very Short Intro (VSI- Floridi) fits nicely between the two. Seife is a wonderful page-turner and a must have if you're into information and math. His "zero" book (Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea was a best seller, and also is about 50c used-- an awesome survey of math. Seife covers both practical problem solving and "meta" issues, but is much less thick and ponderous than Floridi, which has to be studied a little more carefully to get the nuances (not a bad thing). But Floridi isn't all "heavy" -- he talks about a researcher in the "near future" (a million years from now) evaluating our current information leaps!
All three texts cover Shannon, but Floridi and Luenberger do so more with generality and reverence, whereas Seife goes into DEEP detail about redundancy, logarithms, the relationship of amplitudes/ signals to codecs (as in Shannon's connecting log forms to entropy), etc. including a great appendix ON logs. If you enjoy math as well as story telling, Seife delivers.
Floridi is of course much more "up to date" in stats (zettabytes!) etc. since he's more current, but you don't really gain or lose anything there, since much of Floridi is about challenging and re-defining at the conceptual, ideational and definitional levels. If you want detailed, applied, usable problem solving, get Luenberger, if you want a "can't put it down" fun read that touches on the fact that we're "really" living in the Matrix, 13th floor, Tron, etc.-- Seife is the ticket. Both Seife and Floridi give that "wow" feeling that we are really information living in information for the sake of, well, information! They both adequately portray the revolutionary wonder of moving from matter to energy to information in our world view, getting more and more universal (or at the risk of induction, which they both trash-- general), at each leap.
The difference is, Floridi is dry and methodical, Seife is fun and amazing, but you need a little more "math love" with Seife on the other hand. Luenberger is, well, a text. Yes, the best text BUT I include him here mostly for the readers that are looking for less wonder and philosophy and more practical "What does all this mean for careers, business, applications, search engines... etc. All three rate 5 stars, for what they intend to be.
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50 of 63 people found the following review helpful.
Just out of reach
By Historied
I came to this book full of hope for a concise introduction to the field of information. What I found resembled one of those dreams when you are following someone around endless corridors without any clear idea of where they are going, and you can't quite catch up to the figure to ask them: 'where are we headed and for what purpose?' Perhaps the author's St. Cross College, Oxford founded in 1965 consists of Borgesian labyrinths? From time to time during the reading, I stopped to check the structure and content of the sentences and yes they were properly constructed sentences, and they did appear to have information content by the author's criteria. But as I resumed reading, there was a nagging voice saying 'so what?' I liked his map of the subject matter that he kept pointing out: 'you are here', but then I realized that this did not really help. Reading this book made me have no new thoughts, and being generative is one of my key criteria for awarding stars. Increasingly, I began to wonder if this is the future of what the author calls the infosphere. We will have almost infinite connectivity with unlimited numbers of deeply interesting people (and I sure from his bio that Luciano Floridi is intelligent and interesting), and we will exchange messages of considerably complexity, but with little emotive richness. Messages about messages, self referential solipsist stimulation and I am not sure that is how we want to live? And perhaps unfairly I ultimately felt like I had spent some hours in the company of a Train Spotter (called Foamer in the US) explaining the finer points of the locomotive numbering system. Phew! I did finish it. And I will go back to check I am not doing it an injustice. If someone can help me better understand the author's macro take on information, please write a review. It may just be me.
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