The Medium is the Message

This blog post is for the lecture on September 24^th, 2018.

I can understand much better now why Claude Shannon would venture into the electronic mouse game. By the way it was originally explained, it seemed as though he was just “piddling around” and playing with machines for fun. However, the relay system he created was a great way to demonstrate the power of relay memory and the usefulness for the future phone companies. Plus, as a cat owner, the play possibilities are literally endless.

This image is Claude Shannon with his electric mouse, Theseus. Source: Cybernetic Zoo

More interestingly, the thought that order, mathematical order anyway, leads to very little information in the end. What was explained in the book about Shannon, mentioned in an earlier blog, was that the mathematical order present in things, like language, causes the words to be worth less. It’s almost calling text lingo the superior language. For example, the word “you” versus “u.” The former takes longer to write and say, plus it takes longer to understand the meaning because if you’ve never seen any of the letters you have to piece together three instead of one. This means that the “y” and the “o” in the word you are really worthless as they aren’t needed to understand the word, so they aren’t needed at all.

This idea, theoretically, is a good thing for computer science because it allows for language and numbers to hold zero meaning. For example, Google is able to pull up webpages and process information in any language. Regardless of what country or language the program was made in. This is due to the letter grouping of the program and its ability to locate patterns and order in any language and spit back articles that matched the pattern. Overall, the study showed that the ability to find order and mathematically represent it, while making the information worth less, allows programs to better understand the information since it was simplified.