ritchie on Thu, 16 Aug 2001 18:43:10 +0200 (CEST)


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[Nettime-bold] AW: <nettime> Information cannot be free


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A few thouhgs on Mr. Shannon
and Mr. Zeidners thouhts on
Mr. Shannon


Ah- Technicians, ever so sexy when
it comes to explaining communication!

Still, a few buts:

> For instance if a
> lecture is given by a American professor on Economics,
> different information will be recieved by, for
> instance, an english speaking Economics student, an
> english speaking Art student, and a non english
> speaking person.  The quality of the information
> depends entirely on the formulations of the recipient.

Nope. I don't think so. If this English-speaking
professor talked mumbo-jumbo, non of the
three students could understand him "properly";
proper meaning matching his intention. The
lecture is a good example here, because the
primary intention of the speaker is pretty clear.
Can he fulfill it, at least partly? This doesn't
singularly depend on the listeners, au contraire.
So this conclusion only applies if you completely
separate information and meaning. But - wait a
moment: in doing so, you remove your own
difference in the act of reception, because
if info is free from meaning, how can a the
act of understanding defer? In other words:
meaningless information can of course provoce
associations and thoughts in the receiver,
but they are arbitrary, in no way linked
to the communicator and therefore no
different from an inner monologue. Voilá:
you've now taken a construcitivist position,
banishing communication. This system is
coherent, no question, but it moves the
focus away from transmission. Shannon
would no agree to that.

> The more information a sender attempts to pack into
> a message, the more tendency it has to be percieved as
> noise.

It's the code that puts information into context.

> The checksum is used by the
> recipient to make sure the information contained
> within is valid.  If found to be corrupt, it is
> discarded.

No even fuzzy logic comes near to the way
speech and thinking works. In other words:
checksums are pretty exact, redundancy in
communication (usually) is not.
btw: genetics are not sure, if our dna really is
that redundant or if this redundancy does have
manifest effects. genetic engineering is one speculative
field of research, and these are most likely
to be used for pseudo-scientific communicational
comparisons.

> If you take the above principles to thier fullest
> extent, you will likely begin to notice thier
> paradoxical nature.

Sad and true. Their nature is so paradoxical,
it seems, that they are hardly questioned.

> ("the truth can be found in a lie" :)

Now this is an interesting aspect.


> Even the most
> so-called liberal parties participate in the activity
> of censorship.  Without such selective limiting of
> data, there would be no coherence, and therefore
> noise.

Censorship has a political dimension. The filtering
of information beginning litterally at our finger-
tips is not the same as banishing distinct information
and contexts for whatever reason.

> Finally, the purpose of this essay is to dispell the
> popular "information should be free" rubric

I am afraid you did not convince me.

greetings,
ritchie

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