Kassel, September 6, 1997

I am in Kassel to see Documenta and to attend a Congress on Art and Media (Konfigurationen. Zwischen Kunst und Medien), which presents recent German media theory research (all of it, unfortunately, still waiting to be translated into English). Much of this research is focused on a broadly conceived archeology of the digital: developments in philosophy, physics, mathematics, engineering and other disciplines which all converged, towards the 1940s, in a binary code (or, more generally, a discrete form of representation) becoming a kind of DNA of human culture, its new and final Esperanto. The research also scrutinizes logical, philosophical and technical steps which gave rise to the principles of modern computation in the works of Claude Shannon, Norbert Wiener and others. Some of the presenters are the former and present students of Friedrich Kittler who follow him in combining theories of Lacan and Foucault with a history of computer hardware and literary history -- a unique and productive perspective which does not have a parallel in either continental or American media theory.

I am led to think about another intellectual development which is closely aligned with the birth of a digital computer and which, as much as the concepts of the digital and computation, defines out present-day intellectual horizons -- the information theory. The information theory is the key paradigm we have to understand communication and media, old and new. But given that this theory was developed in the 1940s, is it still really useful to us, or is it rather functioning at this point as a kind of intellectual brake, forcing us to ask wrong questions?

In its modern form, the information theory was formulated by Claude Shannon; in 1949, his papers, together with a non-technical overview by Warren Weaver, were published in what became the bible of the coming information age -- Mathematical Theory of Communication.

In his contribution, Weaver extended Shannon's model of information transmission, created to describe physical systems of telecommunications, such as telegraphy or radio, to a more general model of any communication situation. To emphasize this generality, his description of the model deliberately juxtaposes examples of telecommunication systems and human communication. It is useful to quote this description at some length:

The Mathematical Theory of Communication appeared in 1949 and within years the theory was taken up by linguists, psychologists, social scientists, and even art historians.

As information theory was transformed from a tool of the communication engineer into a broad intellectual paradigm, three crucial developments took place. First, the theory was extended to understand not just communication within an electronic system, but also communication between humans as well as between humans and machines. Second, the theory was adopted to describe the meaning and effect of communication -- its semantic and pragmatic aspects. Third, the basic assumption of the theory, that communication is a one-way process, was extended to theorize social communication.

Thus, in the 1950s, the information theory was adopted in the U.S. by the growing field of mass communication studies as the theoretical foundation of the field. Weaver's hope that the model, originally designed to deal solely with the technical aspects of telecommunication, could be applied to describe semantic and pragmatic levels as well, was fully realized: the model was adopted to describe the process of mass communication: sender (film studio, TV station, publisher) -- message (a film, a television program, a newspaper story) -- receiver (film viewer, television viewer, newspaper reader).

In this transfer, the basic postulate of the information theory became an ideology. Shannon begins his exposition of information theory by stating that, "the fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point."

American scholars of mass communication applied the same postulate to the semantic level. Even a textbook on mass communication published in the 1970s, still states:

With such a definition, any discrepancy between the codes of a sender and a receiver becomes undesirable "noise." As Stuart Hall pointed out, the ideology lies in assuming that encoding and decoding codes are or should be the same:

	Communication defined as control

Thus, while American social scientists contrasted American democracy with Soviet totalitarianism, they simultaneously adopted the theoretical model according to which mass communication was synonymous with following the prescribed meaning. In short, communication was defined as control.

Although in the following decades the limitations of the information theory as a way to understand social and cultural communication became apparent, no significant replacement was proposed. Sender, receiver, code, message, channel, signal and noise: these are still the terms which define our understanding of communication today.

How productive is this paradigm for the understanding of communication in the era of electronic and computer media, communication which now involves interactivity, which allows easy switching between one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-one modes (mailing lists, chat channels etc.), which gives the receiver the ability to immediately modify the incoming message and send it back, which often involves real-time group collaboration over distance -- in short, which is anything but simple linear one-way flow of messages from a sender to a receiver? How useful is the sender-receiver opposition itself, if the receiver (i.e. an Internet user) is always a sender as well? While still of value for a communication engineer, as a paradigm to understand social communication in a networked society the information theory seems to be hardly appropriate.

I feel particularly uncomfortable about message-code pair of concepts, which, like more traditional form-content dichotomy, presupposes a clear separation -- and a hierarchy of importance -- between the content and the medium of communication. But in computer media, where does the message ends and the code begins? More often than not, the messages of computer media function to showcase new codes, the codes which replace themselves daily: new browsers, new HTML extensions, JAVA, VRML, pull and push, and so on. Moreover, it is a characteristic feature of computer media that the code is always visible, it is always literally a part of the message: the header of an electronic email, recording all the details of message transmission; polygon count of a VRML scene, file size of a JPEG image, transmission speed continuosly displayed by a browser; computer desktop, always present behind the windows of other applications; and so on.(Archive Information)

The clear separation between message and code breaks down even more than we try to think about how to fit human-computer interface within the information theory paradigm. What exactly is the interface? Does it belong to a message or does it belong to a code? Inevitably, it is both, especially in the case of cultural and artistic communication. Icons and windows, 3-D scenes and text blocks, prompts and animated characters, keyboard and speech input -- far from being a neutral code for the transmission of a pre-determined message, these elements are part and parcel of the message. In the case of interactive media in particular, a message simply does not exist without a particular interface. For example, how can one experience a branching narrative without its particular computer materialization?

In retrospect, the history of information theory's popularity is closely tied up to the history of modern society at large. The theory emerges first in the 1920s in the context of development of new type of communication technologies -- mass communication (radio and television). And it is these technologies of mass communication which allow modern society, in Europe, Russia and the U.S., to become what sociologists later called mass society: the society of total control and command, the society which reaches into the psyche of every one of its citizen through mass communication, the society which broadcasts the same messages to everyone. From this perspective, the extension of the information theory during the 1940s and the 1950s into the paradigm for understanding social communication makes perfect historical sense: indeed, societies at that time did function (at least, tried to) in a way described by the information theory: senders formulated messages, and these messages (such as communism, capitalism, consumerism, Cold War) were transmitted over the channels of mass communication to passive receivers (citizens of mass societies). So the information theory was an accurate description of the social ideal of the time.

Today the situation is fundamentally different. The societies are broken into smaller and smaller interest groups, with a single individual becoming an ultimate unit of individualized marketing attention. Everybody is a transmitter, although quite often what is being transmitted are brand-identities and corporate icons. A subject thus acts as a point in a network which simply re-routes endless messages, receiving and sending them with little modification. Therefore it is also not accidental that the Memes theory gained so much attention recently. The Memes theory is simply a more accurate description (than the information theory) of how social communication functions today. Indeed, sitting in front of our computer screens, with email programs always open, we constantly receive messages which we immediately email to others, or post them to mailing lists.We grab images and sounds, paste them in our own messages; others cut them and paste them in their turn and so on. So it may appear that the ideas flow through us, that we simply a matter, a media through which messages travel. We are not the senders or receivers but a channel.

Yet in comparison to the richness of information theory's concepts, Memes theory does not have much depth. It tries to deprive us from having agency, changing our role from being the originators of messages to being the channel -- but it does not really replaces information theory's model of communication process. Message, code, sender, receiver, signal, noise, channel -- this is a powerful intellectual toolset which we would not be able to replace overnight. Yet we urgently need to keep trying if we to make justice to the new communication realities of our own time.