The Medium is the Message

This blog post pertains to the lecture on September 19^th, 2018.

The first notes I would like to make are on the required reading “A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age” by Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman. For starters, the introduction was puffing (slight exaggerations or white lies in order to make a person seem better or more qualified than they are) slightly in order to explain Shannon’s contributions to the binary code, but the way that the author did it had me convinced for about half of the book that Shannon was the one that invented binary. Most of the book had these slight attributions that wanted the reader to attribute these creations to Shannon instead of the founder, and that made understanding his actual contribution quite difficult. However, I understand that we couldn’t have the inventions without Shannon’s paper “Mathematical Theory of Communication,” which he actually did write. On the other hand, the descriptive writing about Shannon’s childhood and his time in Ann Arbor were very personable and written in a way that was amusing, so I can forgive the previous slight of confusion. Interestingly, and relative to my field, was how Shannon invented the code geneticists use to describe alleles and the population. Which surprised me because I wouldn’t expect a coding person to come up with symbols for a biological science, but I suppose with his cryptography background, symbols were kind of his thing.

To start on the lecture, the ideas created by people like Vannevar Bush and Lee DeForest seem to be the building blocks for the technological advancements we have now, and for that I thank them. While a majority of the systems’ inner workings is lost to me, I can understand all of the thought and work that went into figuring these things out. Especially since it’s difficult for me to conceptualize what they figured out, even though I have the blueprint of what they created. I can personally relate to the necessity of the Audion because, even though all phones already have it, my mother still insists on making sure people in Texas can hear her without the use of the phone. Maybe she got used to her parents speaking without amplification, or maybe phones just aren’t her specialty. Either way, I can see how a room full of people talking like that would increase the noise and therefore reduce the signal.

Last thought, the more I hear about Steve Jobs the more I believe that he just pasted together other people’s ideas in order to make some mixture that he could put his own name on.