1. Instructor's Introduction
2. Student Opener: Michael Perry
3. A hypertext of materials that may be useful for class discussion

• Supplementary Resources for Class
• Other Works That May Be Mentioned in Class ( = especially recommended)
  • James R. Beniger, The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1986)
  • Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic, 1973), Chap. 1, "Thick Description: Toward an Intepretive Theory of Culture," Chap. 15, "Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight"
  • Paul de Man, "The Rhetoric of Temporality," in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2d ed. rev. (Minneapolis: 1983), pp. 187-228
  • J. Feldman and J. March, "Information in Organizations as Signal and Symbol," Administrative Science Quarterly 26 (1981): 171-86
  • A. J. Greimas, Structural Semantics: An Attempt at a Method, trans. Daniele McDowall et. al. (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1983)
  • Simon Singh, The Code Book: The Evolution of Secrecy from Mary, Queen of Scots to Quantum Cryptography (New York: Doubleday, 1999)
  • Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon (New York: Avon, 1999)

Our previous classes looked back into prehistory and history to establish the thesis that "information" is a deeper, broader, and more multifarious category of human experience than we normally think–that information in the contemporary sense, in fact, is continuous with human knowledge as it has advanced through successive evolutions/revolutions of technologies and media. We finished up this "long view" of the history of information by juxtaposing the late literacy of close reading (the New Critics) at the beginning of the 20th century and the hyperliteracy of browsing at the end of the 20th century.

Now,in the next series of classes, we can proceed to fill in the span between the early and late 20th century by focusing on the specifically modern history of electronic, digital, and ultimately networked information. In particular, we'll be attending to the following succession of paradigms of information:

Each of these paradigms has a technological and technical meaning. Each has also been generalized (in the manner of Warren Weaver insistently "generalizing" Claude Shannon's mathematical theory of communication) into an allegory of society. As J. Feldman and J. March have said in their essay, "Information in Organizations as Signal and Symbol" (1981), "Using information, asking for information, and justifying decisions in terms of information have all come to be significant ways in which we symbolize that [a] process is legitimate, that we are good decision makers, and that our organizations are well managed" (p. 178). Whether or not information is useful, in other words, it is first of all symbolic of being enlightened–or, perhaps more accurately, allegorical of a new enlightenment.

Today, we start by taking a close look at the paradigm of information as communication. Specifically, we consider the "information theory" that revolutionized information processing and telecommunications immediately after WWII (or, more broadly, epitomized the epoch of cybernetic, cryptographic, and communicational paradigms of information that the war institutionalized). The specific work to be examined is that of Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver of Bell Labs—work that has clearly had a cultural influence well beyond its original technological context. A testimony to the broad reach of the "Mathematical Theory of Communication" is its influence in such branches of literary study as narratology (e.g., Greimas, Structural Semantics):

Excerpt from the presentation:

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Question or challenge posed during the presentation:

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1. Claude Shannon, "The Mathematical Theory of Communication" (1948)
2. Definitions of "PCM" and "PPM"
3. Warren Weaver, "Recent Contributions to the Mathematical Theory of Communication" (1949)
4. Cleanth Brooks, "The Heresy of Paraphrase" (1947)
5. John Crowe Ransom, The New Criticism (1941)
6. Archibald MacLeish, "Ars Poetica" (1926)
7. e. e. cummings, "mouse)Won"
8. William Wordsworth, The Prelude (1805), 5.608-29
9. Daniel Chandler, "The Transmission Model of Communication" (1995)

Instructor's Preliminary Questions

(1) Information theory and the transmission model of communication have sometimes been called "reductive"; and, in fact, the "digital" as opposed to continuous analog models of signal transmission that fostered Shannon's theory are technically reductive (source information is sampled in steps or intervals). Humanists have long been accustomed to treating "reductive" as a bad word. Yet Marvin Minsky has said that humanity has barely begun to understand the full richness and potential of reductive thought (the kind of thought that breaks complex problems down into discrete particles [instructor's paraphrase of Minsky's denunciation of the humanities at a talk at UCLA]). What have humanists missed about the possibilities of reductiveness?

(2) If information theory is reductive, it is also "general" (Shannon 1, 6; Weaver pp. 95, 114-15). What is the relation between the principle of the digital and the general? How do the principles of the digital and the statistical—the twin foundations of information theory—redefine the notion of the general? Most fundamentally, what specifically 20th-century tendencies or anxieties motivate the urgency of information theory to claim the mantle of the general (in place of such classical universals as Nature, Truth, the Good)?

(3) Does the digital map over reality, or only over technology? (Shannon 3, 6)

(4) Information theory pitilessly divorced "information" from meaning in the name of entropy (Shannon 2, Weaver p. 99). So, too, did deconstruction sunder "textuality" from meaning in the name of: différance, allegory, catachresis, etc. Good or bad analogy?

(5) What is the relation between information "noise" (Shannon 5, Weaver pp. 108-109) and good poetry as read by the New Critics (Brooks, Ransom)?

(6) What is being communicated in these stanzas from Archibald MacLeish's "Ars Poetica"?

For all the history of grief
An empty doorway and a maple leaf.

For love
The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea --

(7) How can e. e. cumming's poem, "mouse)Won" be understood in terms of information theory? Or is it "nonsense" (Weaver p. 99)?

(8) Ditto with the last lines of Book 5 of Wordsworth's The Prelude, which even the New Critics (specifically John Crowe Ransom in his New Criticism) condemned as "bad" indeterminacy or ambiguity?

(9) What is the relation between entropy and poetry? (Weaver p. 117; e. e. cumming, "mouse)Won")

(10) How is desirable entropy distinguished from undesirable noise? (Weaver pp. 108-109)?

(11) There are many ways for cultural criticism to dismantle information theory in the name of social constructivism (Chandler). Let's conclude the critique of information theory by reversing the field: does the constructivist critique seem too easy?

Next: the Marxist and post-Marxist (postmodern) critique of information and communication theory . . . (stay tuned).

[1] THE RECENT DEVELOPMENT Of various methods of modulation such as PCM and PPM which exchange bandwidth for signal-to-noise ratio has intensified the interest in a general theory of communication.

[2] The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point. Frequently the messages have meaning; that is they refer to or are correlated according to some system with certain physical or conceptual entities. These semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem. The significant aspect is that the actual message is one selected from a set of possible messages.

[3] The choice of a logarithmic base corresponds to the choice of a unit for measuring information. If the base 2 is used the resulting units may be called binary digits, or more briefly bits, a word suggested by J. W. Tukey. A device with two stable positions, such as a relay or a flip-flop circuit, can store one bit of information.

[4] By a communication system we will mean a system of the type indicated schematically in Fig. 1. It consists of essentially five parts:

[5] The channel is merely the medium used to transmit the signal from transmitter to receiver. It may be a pair of wires, a coaxial cable, a band of radio frequencies, a beam of light, etc. During transmission, or at one of the terminals, the signal may be perturbed by noise. This is indicated schematically in Fig. 1 by the noise source acting on the transmitted signal to produce the received signal.

[6] We wish to consider certain general problems involving communication systems. To do this it is first necessary to represent the various elements involved as mathematical entities, suitably idealized from their physical counterparts.

2. Definitions of "PCM" and "PPM" (contrasted with "PAM"): (from Microsoft Press Computer Dictionary, 3rd ed. (Redmond, Wash.: Microsoft Press, 1997)

PAM: Pulse Amplitude Modulation. A method of encoding information in a signal by varying the amplitude of pulses. The unmodulated signal consists of a continuous train of pulses of constant frequency, duration, and amplitude. During modulation the pulse amplitudes are changed to reflect the information being encoded.



PCM: Pulse Code Modulation. A method of encoding information in a signal by varying the amplitude of pulses. Unlike pulse amplitude modulation (PAM), in which pulse amplitude can vary continuously, pulse code modulation limits pulse amplitudes to several predefined values. Because the signal is discrete, or digital, rather than analog, pulse code modulation is more immune to noise than PAM.



PPM: Pulse Position Modulation. A method of encoding information in a signal by varying the position of pulses. The unmodulated signal consists of a continuous train of pulses of constant frequency, duration, and amplitude. During modulation the pulse positions are changed to reflect the information being encoded. 

The word communication will be used here in a very broad sense to include all of the procedures by which one mind may affect another. This, of course, involves not only written and oral speech, but also music, the pictorial arts, the theatre, the ballet, and in fact all human behavior. In some connections it may be desirable to use a still broader definition of communication, namely, one which would include the procedures by means of which one mechanism (say automatic equipment to track an airplane and to compute its probable future positions) affects another mechanism (say a guided missle chasing this airplane). (p. 95)

        The word information, in this theory, is used in a special sense that must not be confused with its ordinary usage. In particular, information must not be confused with meaning.
        In fact, two messages, one of which is heavily loaded with meaning and the other of which is pure nonsense, can be exactly equivalent, from the present viewpoint, as regards information. (p. 99)

The quantity which uniquely meets the natural requirements that one sets up for "information" turns out to be exactly that which is known in thermodynamics as entropy. [ . . . ] Thus when one meets the concept of entropy in communication theory, he has a right to be rather excited—a right to suspect that one has hold of something that may turn out to be basic and important. That information be measured by entropy is, after all, natural when we remember that information, in communication theory, is associated with the amount of freedom of choice we have in constructing messages. Thus for a communication source one can say, just as he would also say it of a thermodynamic ensemble, "This situation is highly organized, it is not characterized by a large degree of randomness or of choice—that is to say, the information (or the entropy) is low." p. 103)

Remember that the entropy (or information) associated with the process which generates messages or signals is determined by the statistical character of the process—by the various probabilities for arriving at message situations and for choosing, when in those situations the next symbols. The statistical nature of messages is entirely determined by the character of the source. But the statistical character of the signal as actually transmitted by a channel, and hence the entropy in the channel, is determined both by what one attempts to feed into the channel and by the capabilities of the channel to handle different signal situations. [ . . . ] The best transmitter, in fact, is that which codes the message in such a way that the signal has just those optimum statistical characteristics which are best suited to the channel to be used—which in fact maximize the signal (or one may say, the channel) entropy and make it equal to the capacity C of the channel. p. 108)

How does noise affect information? Information is, we must steadily remember, a measure of one's freedom of choice in selecting a message. The greater this freedom of choice, and hence the greater the information, the greater is the uncertainty that the message actually selected is some particular one. Thus greater freedom of choice, greater uncertainty, greater information go hand in hand.
        If noise is introduced, then the received message contains certain distortions, certain errors, certain extraneous material, that would certainly lead one to say that the received message exhibits, because of the effects of noise, an increased uncertainty. But if the uncertainty is increased, the information is increased, and this sounds as though the noise were beneficial!
        [ . . . ] It is thus clear where the joker is in saying that the received signal has more information. Some of this information is spurious and undesirable and has been introduced via the noise. To get the useful information in the received signal we must subtract out this spurious portion. (pp. 108-109)

        The obvious first remark, and indeed the remark that carries the major burden of the argument, is that the mathematical theory is exceedingly general in its scope, fundamental in the problems it treats, and of classic simplicity and power in the results it reaches.
        This is a theory so general that one does not need to say what kinds of symbols are being considered—whether written letters or words, or musical notes, or spoken words, or symphonic music,or pictures. The theory is deep enough so that the relationships it reveals indiscriminately apply to all these and to other forms of communication. This means, of course, that the theory is sufficiently imaginatively motivated so that it is dealing with the real inner core of the communication problem—with those basic relationships which hold in general, no matter what special form the actual case may take. (pp. 114-15)

An engineering communication theory is just like a very proper and discreet girl accepting your telegram. She pays no attention to the meaning, whether it be sad, or joyous, or embarrassing. But she must be prepared to deal with all that come to her desk. (p. 116)

The appearance of entropy in the theory, as was remarked earlier, is surely most interesting and significant. Eddington has already been quoted in this connection, but there is another passage in "The Nature of the Physical World" which seems particularly apt and suggestive:

        Suppose that we were asked to arrange the following in two categories—distance, mass, electric force, entropy, beauty, melody.
         I think there are the strongest grounds for placing entropy alongside beauty and melody, and not with the first three. Entropy is only found when the parts are viewed in association, and it is by viewing or hearing the parts in association that beauty and melody are discerned. All three are features of arrangement. It is a pregnant thought that one of these three associates should be able to figure as a commonplace quantity of science. The reason why this stranger can pass itself off among the aborigines of the physical world is that it is able to speak their language, viz., the language of arithmetic.

        I feel sure that Eddington would have been willing to include the word meaning along with beauty and melody; and I suspect he would have been thrilled to see, in this theory, that entropy not only speaks the language of arithmetic; it also speaks the language of language. (p. 117)

The conventional terms are much worse than inadequate: they are positively misleading in their implication that the poem constitutes a "statement" of some sort, the statement being true or false, and expressed more or less clearly or eloquently or beautifully; for it is from this formula that most of the common heresies about poetry derive. (p. 962)

For the imagery and the rhythm are not merely the instruments by which this fancied core-of-meaning-which-can-be-expressed-in-a-paraphrase is directly rendered. Even in the simplest poem their mediation is not positive and direct. Indeed, whatever statement we may seize upon as incorporating the "meaning" of the poem, immediately the imagery and the rhythm seem to set up tensions with it, warping and twisting it, qualifiying and revising it. (p. 962)

The essential structure of a poem (as distinguished from the rational or logical structure of the "statement" which we abstract from it) resembles that of architecture or painting: it is a pattern of resolved stresses. Or to move closer still to poetry by considering the temporal arts, the structure of a poem resembles that of a ballet or musical composition. It is a pattern of resolutions and balances and harmonizations developed through a temporal scheme.
       Or to move still closer to poetry, the structure of a poem resembles that of a play. . . . (pp. 964-65)

If the structure of poetry is a structure of the order described, that fact may explain (if not justify) the frequency with which I have had to have recourse . . . to terms like irony and paradox. . . . irony is the most general term that we have for the kind of qualification which the various elements in a context receive from the context. . . . Morever, irony is our most general term for indicating that recognition of incongruities--which, again, pervades all poetry to a degree far beyond what our conventional criticism has been heretofore willing to allow. (pp. 966-67)

What sort of liberties does the poet take with a discourse when he sets it to meter? And what sort of discourse is prepared to permit those liberties?

An argument which admits of alteration in order that it may receive a meter must be partly indeterminate. The argument cannot be maintained exactly as determined by its own laws, for it is going to be un-determined by the meter.

Conversely, a metrical form must be partly indeterminate if it proposes to embody an argument. It is useless to try to determine it closely in advance, for the argument will un-determine it. . . .

I offer a graph, which will be of course an oversimplification, to show the parts which meaning and meter play in the act of composition.

DM stands for determinate meaning, or such of the intended meaning as succeeds in being adhered to; it may be fairly represented by the logical paraphrase of the poem. IM stands for indeterminate meaning, or that part of the final meaning which took shape not according to its own logical necessity but under metrical compulsion; it may be represented by the poem's residue of meaning which does not go into the logical paraphrase. DS stands for the determinate sound-structure, or the meter; and IS stands for whatever phonetic character the sounds have assumed which is in no relation to the meter. . . .

For the sake of the pictorial image, I assume the final poem to be the body of language lying between the intersecting arcs at the center; the one arc (on the left) representing the extreme liberties which meaning has taken with meter, and the other arc (on the right) representing the extreme liberties which meter has taken with meaning. . . .

[Poetry] is a discourse which does not bother too much about the perfection of its logic; and does bother a great deal, as if it were life and death, about the positive quality of that indeterminate thing which creeps in by the back door of metrical necessity. I suggest the closest possible study of IM, the indeterminate meaning.

(pp. 298-303)

mouse)Won
derfully is
anyone else entirely who doesn't
move(Moved more suddenly than)whose

tiniest smile?may Be
bigger than the fear of all
hearts never which have
(Per

haps)loved(or than
everyone that will Ever love)we
've
hidden him in A leaf

and,
Opening
beautiful earth
put(only)a Leaf among dark

ness.sunlight's
thenlike?now
Disappears
some

thing(silent:
madeofimagination
;the incredible soft)ness
(his ears(eyes

[1] Information and meaning arises only in the process of listeners, readers or viewers actively making sense of what they hear or see. Meaning is not 'extracted', but constructed.

[2] Linearity

The transmission model fixes and separates the roles of 'sender' and 'receiver'. But communication between two people involves simultaneous 'sending' and 'receiving' (not only talking, but also 'body language' and so on). In Shannon and Weaver's model the source is seen as the active decision-maker who determines the meaning of the message; the destination is the passive target.

It is a linear, one-way model, ascribing a secondary role to the 'receiver', who is seen as absorbing information. However, communication is not a one-way street. Even when we are simply listening to the radio, reading a book or watching TV we are far more interpretively active than we normally realize.

There was no provision in the original model for feedback (reaction from the receiver). Feedback enables speakers to adjust their performance to the needs and responses of their audience. A 'feedback loop' was added by later theorists, but the model remains linear.

[3] Transmission models treat decoding as a mirror image of encoding, allowing no room for the receiver's interpretative frames of reference. Where the message is recorded in some form 'senders' may well have little idea of who the 'receivers' may be (particularly, of course, in relation to mass communication). The receiver need not simply accept, but may alternatively ignore or oppose a message. We don't all necessarily have to accept messages which suggest that a particular political programme is good for us.

[4] In the transmission model the participants are treated as isolated individuals. Contemporary communication theorists treat communication as a shared social system. We are all social beings, and our communicative acts cannot be said to represent the expression of purely individual thoughts and feelings. Such thoughts and feelings are socio-culturally patterned.

[5] In models such as Shannon and Weaver's no allowance is made for relationships between people as communicators (e.g. differences in power). We frame what is said differently according to the roles in which we communicate. If a friend asks you later what you thought of this lecture you are likely to answer in a somewhat different way from the way you might answer the same question from the undergraduate course director in his office. The interview is a very good example of the unequal power relationship in a communicative situation.

People in society do not all have the same social roles or the same rights. And not all meanings are accorded equal value. It makes a difference whether the participants are of the same social class, gender, broad age group or profession. We need only think of whose meanings prevail in the doctor's surgery. And, more broadly, we all know that certain voices 'carry more authority' than others, and that in some contexts, 'children are to be seen and not heard'. The dominant directionality involved in communication cannot be fixed in a model but must be related to the situational distribution of power.

[6] Finally, the model is indifferent to the nature of the medium. And yet whether you speak directly to, write to, or phone a lover, for instance, can have major implications for the meaning of your communication. There are widespread social conventions about the use of one medium rather than another for specific purposes. People also differ in their personal attitudes to the use of particular media (e.g. word processed Christmas circulars from friends!).

Furthermore, each medium has technological features which make it easier to use for some purposes than for others. Some media lend themselves to direct feedback more than others. The medium can affect both the form and the content of a message. The medium is therefore not simply 'neutral ' in the process of communication.

[7] Conclusion

In short, the transmissive model is of little direct value to social science research into human communication, and its endurance in popular discussion is a real liability. Its reductive influence has implications not only for the commonsense understanding of communication in general, but also for specific forms of communication such as speaking and listening, writing and reading, watching television and so on. In education, it represents a similarly transmissive model of teaching and learning. And in perception in general, it reflects the naive 'realist' notion that meanings exist in the world awaiting only decoding by the passive spectator. In all these contexts, such a model underestimates the creativity of the act of interpretation.

Alternatives to transmissive models of communication are normally described as constructivist: such perspectives acknowledge that meanings are actively constructed by both initiators and interpreters rather than simply 'transmitted'. However, you will find no single, widely-accepted constructivist model of communication in a form like that of Shannon and Weaver's block diagram. This is partly because those who approach communication from the constructivist perspective often reject the very idea of attempting to produce a formal model of communication. Where such models are offered, they stress the centrality of the act of making meaning and the importance of the socio-cultural context.