The Machine in the Ghost: Digitality and its Consequences by Robin Boast

Author:Robin Boast [Boast, Robin]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Reaktion Books
Published: 2017-07-03T04:00:00+00:00

‘Information’ had been an important problem since the beginning of the twentieth century. With the explosion of communications technologies, the issue of getting the message through had become critical, not only for governments, militaries and businesses, but for the growing population that relied on, and paid for, communication technologies. As early as 1924, a Bell Labs engineer, Harry Nyquist, had worked on the problem of ‘Certain Factors Affecting Telegraph Speed’, where he explored the factors affecting the ‘speed of transmission of intelligence’.22 By ‘intelligence’ he meant both the signal of a message, that which was transmitted, and the signal as received, as the same signal without distortion, but also what the meaning of the message was for a person. Nyquist did not distinguish between the signal transmitted and what is normally understood as the signal’s meaning. Rather, his contribution was that he suggested that there could be an ‘optimum code’ that would allow the maximum amount of ‘intelligence’ transmitted over a line when the number of signal elements (letters, numbers, symbols) was known.

A few years later, in 1928, another Bell Labs engineer, R.V.L. Hartley, clarified Nyquist’s ideas by arguing that, as an engineering problem, it was unnecessary to consider what the actual ‘meaning’ of a message was, but that what mattered was to determine how to transmit the message at the maximum speed with minimal distortion.23

Hence in estimating the capacity of the physical system to transmit information we should ignore the question of interpretation, make each selection perfectly arbitrary, and base our results on the possibility of the receiver’s distinguishing the result of selecting any one signal from that of selecting any other. By this means the psychological factors and their variations are eliminated and it becomes possible to set up definite quantitative measure considerations alone.24

Drawing on the work of both Nyquist and Hartley, Shannon worked throughout the war on generalizing these two insights – the optimum code and information transmission as a purely engineering problem – even further. He fully accepted Hartley’s argument that information transmission, as an engineering problem, had nothing whatsoever to do with meaning. It is not that Shannon did not think that the meaning of a message, what we understand is meant or what is said, was unimportant – on the contrary. What he was interested in, however, was the engineering problem of how to get a signal, which consisted of a series of encoded symbols – which from the engineer’s point of view only incidentally has meaning for a sender and a receiver – from a transmitter to a receiver without any errors in the symbol sequence. It was this signal of encoded symbols that he designated ‘information’.

It seems that he had largely formulated his theory of information by 1943, but for some reason still unknown he didn’t feel compelled to publish his findings during the war. However, he did publish his groundbreaking paper ‘A Mathematical Theory of Communication’ in 1948.25 In his paper, Shannon showed how all the diverse forms of communication media

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