Skip to main content

Too Much Information - Dave Gorman ****

It might seem odd to feature a book by comedian Dave Gorman on a popular science site, but this is a book about information, information technology, media and its impact on us as people - so entirely deserves its place here.

 Admittedly, the book can often seem like a specialist version of the TV show Grumpy Old Men on the topic of information, IT and the media - and there certainly are some funny parts to it - but just as the subtitle suggests that Gorman is trying to think in a deluge of often unwanted 'information', itself of dubious nature, so it gives the reader the chance to do the same.

 What comes through, as is usually the case with Gorman, is an obsessive fascination with detail (which, if you're a geek like me, you will probably share). He picks up on a piece of information and pulls it apart to destruction. So, for instance, he riffs (there is really no other word for it) about the oddity of the band Scouting for Girls putting out a 'greatest hits' album in which clearly (and he has a chart to prove it) most of the tracks weren't hits at all.

 Some of the content of Too Much Information is pure grumpiness, as in the plea for Twitter users to gain some perspective and stop thinking it's funny or clever to change words by prefacing them with 'tw' to make them special-to-Twitter. People, he assures us, remain people, not 'tweeple' or (shudder) 'tweeps'. Elsewhere he comes up with a fascinating analysis of why all HTC mobile phones show a particular time in adverts, uncovers the bizarre ways that celebrities are exploited by (and exploit) the media and ponders the social impact of the 'next customer' separators we use on supermarket conveyor belts.

 The stories, as they effectively are, range in length from just one page to at least ten, and often hit the spot, though with 40 different, loosely collected topics, the book can feel too bitty and lacking cohesion as you read through it. Even so, I found many of the subjects fascinating, some informative and almost all of them enjoyable. 

 If you've never taken the time to step back and think about what being in such a connected, information rich world does to us - and how people and companies try to manipulate us through that information - it really is time you did so. And Dave Gorman is here to be a grumpy guide to that voyage of discovery.
Paperback:  

Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg

Labels

Labels:

Comments

  1. zebedee30 June 2024 at 01:55

    I'm not certain whether or not Dave was in the same year as me in Mathematics at Manchester University. He dropped out after the first year and there were rather a large number of us.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

We Are Eating the Earth - Michael Grunwald *****

If I'm honest, I assumed this would be another 'oh dear, we're horrible people who are terrible to the environment', worthily dull title - so I was surprised to be gripped from early on. The subject of the first chunk of the book is one man, Tim Searchinger's fight to take on the bizarrely unscientific assumption that held sway that making ethanol from corn, or burning wood chips instead of coal, was good for the environment. The problem with this fallacy, which seemed to have taken in the US governments, the EU, the UK and more was the assumption that (apart from carbon emitted in production) using these 'grown' fuels was carbon neutral, because the carbon came out of the air. The trouble is, this totally ignores that using land to grow fuel means either displacing land used to grow food, or displacing land that had trees, grass or other growing stuff on it. The outcome is that when we use 'E10' petrol (with 10% ethanol), or electricity produced by ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Battle of the Big Bang - Niayesh Afshordi and Phil Harper *****

It's popular science Jim, but not as we know it. There have been plenty of popular science books about the big bang and the origins of the universe (including my own Before the Big Bang ) but this is unique. In part this is because it's bang up to date (so to speak), but more so because rather than present the theories in an approachable fashion, the book dives into the (sometimes extremely heated) disputed debates between theoreticians. It's still popular science as there's no maths, but it gives a real insight into the alternative viewpoints and depth of feeling. We begin with a rapid dash through the history of cosmological ideas, passing rapidly through the steady state/big bang debate (though not covering Hoyle's modified steady state that dealt with the 'early universe' issues), then slow down as we get into the various possibilities that would emerge once inflation arrived on the scene (including, of course, the theories that do away with inflation). ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics - Frank Verstraete and Céline Broeckaert **

It's with a heavy heart that I have to say that I could not get on with this book. The structure is all over the place, while the content veers from childish remarks to unexplained jargon. Frank Versraete is a highly regarded physicist and knows what he’s talking about - but unfortunately, physics professors are not always the best people to explain physics to a general audience and, possibly contributed to by this being a translation, I thought this book simply doesn’t work. A small issue is that there are few historical inaccuracies, but that’s often the case when scientists write history of science, and that’s not the main part of the book so I would have overlooked it. As an example, we are told that Newton's apple story originated with Voltaire. Yet Newton himself mentioned the apple story to William Stukeley in 1726. He may have made it up - but he certainly originated it, not Voltaire. We are also told that ‘Galileo discovered the counterintuitive law behind a swinging o...
Post a Comment
Read more