Information Theory


By: Stephen Showalter

The information theory is a theory that deals primarily with the structural aspect of communication. This is directly due to the fact that it was created by Claude Shannon, a Bell Telephone Company research scientist. He was unconcerned with the human side of communication. The semantic meaning of a message or the pragmatic effect on the listener mattered little to him. Warren Weaver, an executive with the Rockefeller Foundation and the Sloan-Kettering Institute on Cancer Research, expressed in an essay that reducing the loss of information was the solution to any communication problem. The basis of the information theory is to reusce any interference in the communication of a message. A linear model of communication is used in A First Look at Communication Theory to illustrate the thought of communication in a technical sense.



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