Shannon and Weaver separated information content from the means of
its carriage. ... While Shannon and Weaver’s information theor y was strictly
technical and not concerned with the meaning of messages, it was applied
far more broadly in describing and analysing communications processes.
Information was imagined as a centre of social actions – the ‘information
revolution’, and the ‘information society’. The computer as information trans-
ferer and processor applied the epistemological model of ‘information’ in
this tradition. Treating communications as largely a problem of ‘getting the
message across’, and information as autonomous and central, has become
a dominant and often uncriticised premise of contemporar y info-culture.
The operation relies on a belief that the informational sign unproblematically
stands in for the actual. (88)Shannon and Weaver’s theory, a result of research conducted for
the AT&T telecommunications company, aimed to account for how a unit
of information which is produced by a sender at one end of a communi-
cation channel is able to be faithfully reproduced at the other end by a
receiver. The source may be speech on the telephone, writing in a book, or
beeps on a telegraph wire, which is conducted on a channel (a wire, a
magazine or book) and received by another person with or without the aid
of a ‘decoding’ device.^13 Such a sensibility about information has entered
into everyday popular conceptions. The very nomenclature ‘hi-fidelity’
is erected on this model – that somehow an original performance of a
musical piece can be faithfully reproduced on an electronic music system
in one’s living room. George Lakoff (1995: 116) points out that such a model
also pervades the epistemology of education. The idea that teachers
‘impart’ knowledge to the minds of students which must then be ‘regur-
gitated in an exam’ presupposes that all knowledge is comprised of stable
quanta of information, and that such information is understood by sender
and receiver in exact duplication.
Shannon and Weaver’s theory is pure medium theory: they were
interested in neither the content of messages, their meaning, the possibil-
ity of intentionality behind them, nor the social and psychological condi-
tion of their reception. Yet their theory became a standard departure point
for ‘information theory’ as it was appropriated by other disciplines and
perspectives, including structural linguistics (particularly Roman
Jakobson) and media effects theory. The distinction of this theory is that it
rapidly claimed for itself a universal applicability, whether the kind of
communication being examined was between machines, biological enti-
ties or human institutions.
It is not surprising that Shannon and Weaver’s physics of communi-
cation could easily synchronize with the co-emerging field of cybernetics
(Shannon was a student of Norbert Wiener – the heralded founder of this
discipline). Wiener’s Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the
Animal and Machine([1948] 1961) appeared the year before Shannon and
Weaver’s text. In this text, perhaps one of the first formalized understand-
ings of ‘information’ as an ontological force in social life was presented.56 COMMUNICATION THEORYHolmes-03.qxd 2/15/2005 10:31 AM Page 56