Information Ages offers a long historical account of how societies organise knowledge, beginning with counting, tallying and early writing, moving through print culture, and ending with the rise of the computer.

Hobart and Schiffman’s central claim is that information is never merely accumulated: every major communication technology changes the categories through which reality can be stored, compared and understood.

The book is dense in how it traces the material relation between literacy, numeracy and classification. Writing emerges from accounting as much as speech; print produces not only more books but new pressures on memory, authority and systems of order; computing extends this history by making information increasingly abstract, sortable and manipulable. Published at the threshold of mass internet culture, its treatment of the digital revolution is inevitably dated in detail, but historically useful precisely because it captures how computation appeared before platforms swallowed the network. For readers interested in media history, the history of knowledge, writing technologies and the deep prehistory of the information economy.

Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. First Johns Hopkins paperback edition. Light shelf wear; internally clean.