#communications technology

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Although worried and worrying discourse has complemented the unveiling of newer public A.I. technologies, we've already done a perfectly fine job of out-dating other forms of media communication by way of the aforementioned analytic format; just as, of course, earlier methods of industrial production rendered a whole variety of professions or emphases as outmoded. If you don't have the relevant editing tools at your disposal and/or don't want to spend hundreds of hours cropping footage and making it fit with music and your own narration, well -- too bad! And even then, of course, there's no guarantee that your video will reach your desired scale of an audience. I've found dozens of such videos on YT channels with only a few thousand views, if that; and on each channel it's clear that the people finally gave up after the monumental task of assembling these videos had no equivalent payoff.

Personally, I do still believe in the primacy of the text (or the spoken word, with no competing stimuli); in text as the primary form of critical engagement. More than that -- if I'm going to read a non-fiction work, I want the paged book, and not a digital version. Now, this preference is just that: a preference. And it surely is a preference a good number of people share. I find that a paged book lends itself better to my own retention of the material; and I really enjoy making my notes on the book's paper with a pen. But I don't believe that the construction of multimedia behemoths should be a baseline requirement for discourse.

I wonder if we will, in the near future, start to see some resurgence of the valuation of unembellished textual analysis complementing a more general fatigue with Internet-derived overstimulation. I've already run across numerous channels with fairly sizable communities where there is an appreciation for the "simplicity" of the formats: a person in a room just talking to the camera. I think a lot of people like engaging analysis where the only barrier of significance is devising a good script. To be sure, this is a formidable barrier in itself. I find writing long-form pieces to be the most difficult of any of my creative practices (which include drawing, painting, and music composition). But if writing on media were my main passion or goal in life, I'd feel fairly crushed to know that these projects now required me to put in perhaps quadruple the amount of time to make a blip on the radar of engagement.

EDIT: Thinking on this -- I wonder if there's a parallel to be found in the realm of supplementing one's work with excess-entertainment via social media engagement; e.g., daily Instagram videos. "Excess-entertainment" refers to material that's being made not because everyone who's making it wants to make it, but because each person is now beholden to an abstractly instituted algorithm of engagement -- an algorithm reinforced by audiences who, also under algorithmic influence, will wonder what's going on if a week goes by without something from a Content Creator.

An article about the invention of information theory in Nautilus. Excerpt: 

Information was something guessed at rather than spoken of, something implied in a dozen ways before it was finally tied down. Information was a presence offstage. It was there in the studies of the physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz, who, electrifying frog muscles, first timed the speed of messages in animal nerves just as Thomson was timing the speed of messages in wires. It was there in the work of physicists like Rudolf Clausius and Ludwig Boltzmann, who were pioneering ways to quantify disorder—entropy—little suspecting that information might one day be quantified in the same way. Above all, information was in the networks that descended in part from the first attempt to bridge the Atlantic with underwater cables. In the attack on the practical engineering problems of connecting Points A and B—what is the smallest number of wires we need to string up to handle a day’s load of messages? how do we encrypt a top-secret telephone call?—the properties of information itself, in general, were gradually uncovered. [...]

Each year that Shannon placed a call, he was less likely to speak to a human operator and more likely to have his call placed by machine, by one of the automated switchboards that Bell Labs grandly called a “mechanical brain.” In the process of assembling and refining these sprawling machines, Shannon’s generation of scientists came to understand information in much the same way that an earlier generation of scientists came to understand heat in the process of building steam engines. [...]

Where Nyquist used the vague concept of “intelligence” and Hartley struggled to explain the value of discarding the psychological and semantic, Shannon took it for granted that meaning could be ignored. In the same way, he readily accepted that information measures freedom of choice: What makes messages interesting is that they are “selected from a set of possible messages.” It would satisfy our intuitions, he agreed, if we stipulated that the amount of information on two punch cards doubled (rather than squared) the amount of information on one, or that two electronic channels could carry twice the information of one.That was Shannon’s debt. What he did next demonstrated his ambition. Every system of communication—not just the ones existing in 1948, not just the ones made by human hands, but every system conceivable—could be reduced to a radically simple essence.

• The information source produces a message. • The transmitter encodes the message into a form capable of being sent as a signal. • The channel is the medium through which the signal passes. • The noise source represents the distortions and corruptions that afflict the signal on its way to the receiver. • The receiver decodes the message, reversing the action of the transmitter. • The destination is the recipient of the message.

The beauty of this stripped-down model is that it applies universally. It is a story that messages cannot help but play out—human messages, messages in circuits, messages in the neurons, messages in the blood. You speak into a phone (source); the phone encodes the sound pressure of your voice into an electrical signal (transmitter); the signal passes into a wire (channel); a signal in a nearby wire interferes with it (noise); the signal is decoded back into sound (receiver); the sound reaches the ear at the other end (destination).

In one of your cells, a strand of your DNA contains the instructions to build a protein (source); the instructions are encoded in a strand of messenger RNA (transmitter); the messenger RNA carries the code to your cell’s sites of protein synthesis (channel); one of the “letters” in the RNA code is randomly switched in a “point mutation” (noise); each three-“letter” code is translated into an amino acid, protein’s building block (receiver); the amino acids are bound into a protein chain, and the DNA’s instructions have been carried out (destination).

Those six boxes are flexible enough to apply even to the messages the world had not yet conceived of—messages for which Shannon was, here, preparing the way. They encompass human voices as electromagnetic waves that bounce off satellites and the ceaseless digital churn of the Internet. They pertain just as well to the codes written into DNA. Although the molecule’s discovery was still five years in the future, Shannon was arguably the first to conceive of our genes as information bearers, an imaginative leap that erased the border between mechanical, electronic, and biological messages.

First, though, Shannon saw that information science had still failed to pin down something crucial about information: its probabilistic nature. When Nyquist and Hartley defined it as a choice from a set of symbols, they assumed that each choice from the set would be equally probable, and would be independent of all the symbols chosen previously. It’s true, Shannon countered, that some choices are like this. But only some. For instance, a fair coin has a 50-50 chance of landing heads or tails. This simplest choice possible—heads or tails, yes or no, 1 or zero—is the most basic message that can exist. [...]

The new unit of Shannon’s science was to represent this basic situation of choice. Because it was a choice of 0 or 1, it was a “binary digit.” In one of the only pieces of collaboration Shannon allowed on the entire project, he put it to a lunchroom table of his Bell Labs colleagues to come up with a snappier name. Binit and bigit were weighed and rejected, but the winning proposal was laid down by John Tukey, a Princeton professor working at Bell. Bit.

For Throwback Thursday, we’re experiencing the full power of fax with this 1989 pamphlet from MCI Communications Corporation. Incidentally, “It’s there already” remains an excellent slogan for fax.

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