It’s difficult to place this book in terms of its expected audience and thus what its expected function is. As it is, it’s fine as an overview of technology and information from year dot to the present, but as I see it, it suffers from a number of weaknesses.

(i) The definitions of technology and knowledge are both very “common sense” (i.e., underdeveloped), without sign-posting or drawing out the cross-overs between these two terms, or how they might differ in profound theoretical ways. This is probably a corollary of a another of this book’s shortcomings, namely...

(ii) As per a Kirkus review of the book, there’s something of the forest-for-the-trees syndrome, in that as a recitation of facts and examples, there isn’t a sufficient narrative thread, or threads plural. It's as though there is still some kind of fear of an overarching meta-narrative, but I tend to read big texts like this for the author’s ability to pull the various strands together, and to highlight trends.To avoid doing this is a disservice to the reader, given that at 400 pages, there is a hope/expectation that the author has reflected on the (admittedly vast) materials collected, and has provided the reader with a tool, such as a cohering idea or set of ideas, to make sense of the book’s litany of facts.

(iii) There are also some other points, which come out of the author’s background and previous research, such that there is perhaps too great an emphasis on cartography and map-making as information technology. Perhaps if this had been used as the idea-spine of the book, this would not be a failing, but it seems that a trick was missed here in not using one of the author’s scholarly strengths as a way to give this work greater coherence.

Ultimately, I feel that other works have taken this overview approach to either information/knowledge or technology, with greater success (though they may have dealt with shorter periods of time, or sets of technologies). It is more a dictionary than a grammar of information and technology. I had truly hoped that this book would do what it appears to set out to do, but in the end I don't regard it think it was successful. ( )

I will start with Winston Churchill‘s adage « A nation that forgets its past is condemned to relive it … »
This is actually to emphasis the fact that everything coming from the past!
I particularly appreciated all along the book the retrospective and past map with recent and present stories!
The Power of Knowledge is therefore a nice and smart introduction to “Information is all” and the Power to surround it is the key …
Great book – no doubt!

May,1st - 2014 ( )

Discovering that this sizable volume is not a science book or an information-theory book or a technology book but a comprehensive history book, and an academic and UK-centric one at that, I only read the last quarter, which deals with the recent past and the present. Included there are some mentions of the impact of new digital technology and the reprehensible undermining of privacy in electronic communications.