Claude Shannon and "The Medium is the Message"

Claude Shannon came up with definitional characteristics for information that help us distinguish the difference between content and the medium that delivers content to us. His definitions:

Uncertainty (219): "'Information is closely associated with uncertainty.' Uncertainty, in turn, can be measured by counting the number of possible messages. If only one message is possible, there is no uncertainty and thus no information."

Difficulty (219): "What is significant is the difficulty in transmitting the message from one point to another." Perhaps this seemed backward, or tautological, like defining mass in terms of the force needed to move an object. But then, mass can be defined that way. 

Surprise (219): Some messages may be likelier than others, and information implies surprise. Surprise is a way of talking about probabilities. If the letter following t (in English) is h, not so much information is conveyed, because the probability of h was relatively high. 
(247): "For Wiener, entropy was a measure of disorder; for Shannon, of uncertainty. Fundamentally, as they were realizing, these were the same. The more inherent order exists in a sample of English text... the more predictability there is, and in Shannon's terms, the less information is conveyed by each subsequent letter. When the subject guesses the next letter with confidence, it is redundant, and the arrival of the letter contributes no new information. Information is surprise."

These definitions seem relative and contextual; to define information as entropy or disorder, one needs an understanding of the opposite: order. If text is formulaic and requires no mind to decipher, or cannot be deciphered, it cannot be information. YET. 

Information is not information – until understood beyond the dots and dashes that facilitate our opportunity to understand it. Without a "backboard" or basis to bounce on (language, body language, code) it is not information. 
(I am struggling to find the converse of information – perhaps "beeps", in Shannon's words. Keep reading...)

Gleik writes on page 246, "[Shannon] was talking about information as something transmitted from one point to another... What mattered was that he was going to represent the information source as a statistical process, generating messages with varying probabilities." 
And on 248, Shannon explains the difference between signals and information: "There were 'beep beeps' but that was all, no information. The moment one transforms that set of signals into other signals our brain can make an understanding of, then information is born – it's not in the beeps."

To illustrate, here's a metaphor about trees.
People often pose the question, "If a tree falls in the woods and there is no one there to hear it, does it make a sound?" The tree crashing to the ground does indeed create fluctuations in the surrounding air waves. These waves, in the presence of an ear, can be interpreted as sound. But without an ear present, there is no sound – merely disturbed air waves. Thus, it does not make a sound.

Shannon meant that without a medium to process content, it cannot be information. 

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This brings us to our quote from Marshall McLuhan: "The medium is the message."

To expand and put into a "big idea" context, McLuhan also said in 'The Medium is the Message,' (1967): "Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which mean communicate than by the content of the communication.”

Some people have format preferences for the intake of messages. My reading comprehension is better when I read text on paper than when I read it on a computer screen. I have evolved (or devolved, perhaps...) to the point where when I look at a screen, my attention splits. My brain is wired to buzz with tappable possibilities that Internet devices afford.
With a newspaper, the medium is constrained. My brain goes into paper mode, and I don't get the urge to press (command+t) when I don't understand a term or an event in the text. I focus more on what I can read in that moment.

I think that's what this quote is getting at. Content is essentially the same from screen to page, and from podcast to radio broadcast. But the device – the medium – is what's capable of changing a society. As a generation, we have felt how the Internet changes our attention span, our expectations for information and our habits. 

Cellphone gave us mobility. They snipped the curly cord that chained us to desks.

The smartphone made it almost impossible to stay off the grid. We sleep with our phones and keep them in our pockets all day. The Web is an extension of reality, of our species' consciousness, intellect, and attitude. Things that happen online are "real life."

Not much content has changed an entire society like that. A single broadcast, publication or piece of art does not have the same embedded potential to rewire a mind. 

More elegantly put, "The macro-level interpretation suggests that the form of mediums have an effect on the perception, cognition and actions of humans and society at large, quite regardless of the content. The inherent qualities of the medium do not need to attach themselves to content and fuse in a symbiosis to create an effect. At this larger scale, the medium has a message of its own. Furthermore, the message of the medium as a whole is far greater than any individual piece of content." -Media and Architecture blog, "The Medium is the Message"

So the quote is not saying that content does not create change in a viewer/reader, or that medium and message are the same thing. The medium is ultimately a more powerful vehicle for change – even though it is easier to perceive a change in oneself at the impetus of specific content, rather than the slower, more subtle evolutionary effects of a medium.


For a more elaborate example of this effect, I will write a future post about the difference between Twitter and Vine, a new Twitter-like video app. Check out Vinepeek for the most basic introduction, and stay tuned!