Philosophical Reflections on the Age of Ephemera
31
electrical engineer, information occurs in a context, and it transpires serially,
i.e., in time. It is a human activity—an exchange between two points. A
communicative act that is expected is not as informative as one that surprises us.
For example, as we are reading, a letter “u” that follows a “q” adds little—we
were expecting that. Someone interested in the compression of transmitted data,
as Shannon certainly was, would say that the “u” was dispensable with little
degradation to the message. Of course, the “u” is only dispensable against a
background of written English, which is a code shared by the sender and the
receiver—Shannon was also a cryptographer—but the point was that “about
50%” of a given transmitted message is superfluous.17 It can be omitted from the
message with little degradation in meaning. Information can be compressed.
Ambiguity can be reduced—in the transmission, if not in the language itself.
Analog information can be reduced to binary packets and stored and transmitted
more efficiently and accurately. These mechanical improvements in the medium
of communication are important to us for two reasons: they greatly increase the
speed with which we access or exchange information (this is not a trivial point);
and they greatly improve our ability to duplicate information (and this is also
not trivial).
Speed is not trivial because it changes the content of information.
Gleick quotes Heinz von Foerster, at an early cybernetics conference,
complaining that information theory is all about the “beep beeps” of
communication: bandwidth, compression, noise reduction.18 He was concerned
that all these theories about the transmission of information had little to say
about the value of the information. But this is a naive view of information (i.e.,
thinking that what information is carried is independent of the means of carrying
the message). Letters of the nineteenth century were florid and full of politeness,
while the telegraph required a functional frankness. One would not try to discuss
feelings by telegraph, nor would the latest stock reports be transmitted in a
lengthy letter. The one was too fast, the other too slow. There was an overlap of
users of the two technologies, so we know that the difference is not the result of
historical changes in communication style or substance. We should not be
surprised, then, that geometric increases in speed of communication, as well as
the changing loci of communication—we now communicate everywhere, even
while on the toilet—would have an effect on the style and substance of
communication overall. Convenience is a harsh taskmaster.
Easy duplication is not trivial because it used to be hard—transcription
is an issue for analog transmission in a way that it is not for digital transmission.
For example, the quality of an analog magnetic signal degrades across a long
copper wire—a problem for Claude Shannon—as does the continuous groove of
a vinyl LP over successive plays. As such, the quality of the transcription is a
concern, and a high quality transcription has value. A very clear recording, for
instance, was something highly prized. This emphasis on clarity bled over into
the digital age, so that the first CD I ever heard—it was, in fact, a demonstration
CD, featuring the sound of a passenger jet passing overhead—was so clear, so