3 ms·
"The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point. Frequently th
by dbcurtis 8y ago
"The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point. Frequently the messages have meaning..."
(emphasis in the original)
I find that second sentence humorous every time I read it... I wonder if he had seen the current state of internet discussion if he would have changed "frequently" to "occasionally".
- JumpCrisscross 8y ago> I wonder if he had seen the current state of internet discussion if he would have changed "frequently" to "occasionally" Which is accurate. A lot of Internet communication is a tracker phoning home, TLS handshakes and other communication with content but no "meaning" per se. In Shannon's day, such industrial communications--over telegraph--were common enough to warrant mentioning but not prevalent enough to make up the bulk of human communication traffic.
- gowld 8y agoMetadata is data. When Shannon says "meaning", he is including control channel information as well. He is distinguishing variable messages from copying constants, which is a different and easier challenge.
- zrm 8y agoMeaning in this case essentially means context. You have a communications channel, it delivers to you four 32-bit integers, what do they represent? Positional coordinates? One pixel in RGBA? In CMYK? IPv4 port/address 4-tuple with zero-padded 16-bit ports? A single IPv6 address? Big endian or little endian? The bits are the same, the meaning is different.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]