Shannon and Weaver, Wiener

              I surprisingly enjoyed the readings more than had been expected. I personally have never been fond of math and when I realized the theme behind the readings was mathematical I became somewhat apprehensive. Nonetheless, I found the logic and theoretical orientation behind the readings to be stimulating and thought provoking. I hope Shannon and Weaver might be pleased that their choice of written symbols was (at least somewhat) accurately transmitted into my mind and thus decoded into my subjective understanding of their message. Alas, the product of my interpretation is yet to be seen. I suppose it is affecting my behavior in a desired way, after all, I am thinking about the material in a critical way and reorganizing the information that seems rational for me.  

            I want to address one topic in this blog, feel free to comment and to criticize. Shannon and Weaver state, “if the signal being transmitted is continuous (as in oral speech or music) rather than being formed of discreet symbols (as in written speech, telegraphy, etc.), how does this affect the problem” (99)? They go on to address topics such as entropy and the probability of word combinations within an individual’s potential word choices. Furthermore, that the English language is essentially 50% redundant, which statistically influences the probability and choice on has in communicating. As far as continuous vs. discreet communication goes, would the does the influence of the Internet and blogging introduce a new medium? As with oral communication, one can continue a conversation, but it lacks the immediate response that oral communication does. This surely will affect the algorithm because it gives the transmitter longer to weigh out what she or he wants to say. Moreover, because the communication is anonymous, there seems to be a freedom to abandon rationality and to embrace emotional thought in response to others.

            I want to comment on entropy because both Shannon and Weaver & Wiener bring up the second law of thermodynamics. Weiner states, “a message can lose order spontaneously in the act of transmission, but can not gain it” (Wiener, 7). Various psychopathologies come to mind. One characterized by a seemingly all-encompassing entropy, one in which there seems to be no order and the probability of the next word endless, is schizophrenia. In this disorder the disorganization of speech and thought is extreme. I know that this wasn’t a major theme for the Wiener reading, but he does mention intellectual property and secrecy on page 17. It reminded me of the great extent at which musical artists go to keep their music a secret until the release date. For example Lady Gaga’s new single wont be released until February 13^th. Ironically as I am writing this, one of her songs just came on from my playlist… which reminds me of algorithms that predict the probability that something will be communicated. I just checked and my playlist has the potential for transmitting 1,756 different signals, 22 of which are Lady Gaga, meaning there was a 1.2% chance that my playlist would choose to encode a Lady Gaga song into my brain. Typically it would be decoded into some sort of excited emotion that might result in dancing, however, this time the result was different because it resulted in a synthesis of a written transmission from Shannon and Weaver, Weiner, and a musical transmission from my playlist/Lady Gaga. As in Shannon and Weaver’s Problem C (the problem in effectively getting the desired action out of communication), I do not know if my action was the desired response from any of the transmissions, however, I should suspect it was effective since I am further exposing their work to the public in my written transmission.