Well I’m not much of a mathematician (like most of us), so my whole brain glazed over when Shannon and Weaver started talking logarithms and probability. However, their distinction between ‘information’ and ‘meaning,’ along with Wiener’s discussion of humanity’s role in new media, helped me to figure out what is perhaps their common assumption: communication, even on the most personal and human level, is becoming mechanized, quantized, and, as a result, limited.
Shannon and Weaver write that meaning is not necessary to communication engineering or mechanics, but that the engineering does affect the meaning (99-100). The engineering of a communication system determines what you can and cannot transmit, and what from that transmission is received. I know the authors did not intend for me to think of text messaging, but I did. I considered all the meaning which is lost when words are written down. Intonation, facial expression…even the words themselves, in the case of those newfangled devices that ‘fix’ the spelling in text messages, and actually just end up creating jumbled nonsense. I wonder if the things a communication system takes away or just exchanges can, in this way, alter the message and its meaning in the same way that added ‘noise’ does. This kind of problem is not as limiting as, say, a two-choice system like the one described on pages 100-101, but considering that this text messaging as a form of communication has replaced a lot of day to day interaction, I would say any limitation is consequential.
This problem of dehumanization in communication is addressed in Wiener’s writing as well. His evaluation is a warning against mechanization for its own sake. He writes that when new forms of technology are developed, people tend to use and exploit them simply because they exist, with no concern for the value of the human work which the machine replaces. The “literal-minded” machines can simply never be capable of the complex and dynamic thought processes of the human mind, and they are therefore unfit to make decisions for human beings, which, Wiener fears, humans will eventually depend on them to do (212). I guess it all comes down to free will. To what extent is communication technology extending freedom (by making information accessible and allowing us to communicate with more people more quickly), and to what extent is our communication becoming limited? Are we sacrificing meaning to gain more raw information?
I like what you say about Weiner's essay, that human value and work is decreasing as mechanization becomes the norm in creation. When we've progressed so much as a society that we can outsource production not only to machines but to machine-like humans in factories thousands of miles away, something is lost. Creativity, on many levels, is definitely lost. Value and worth are being cast aside to make everything better, cheaper, faster. I hope that his prediction about humans losing their ability to make decisions and relying more on computers to do the thinking for them is hyperbole. We already rely on the internet as a main source of information, and communication has grown so common place that we are all connected. I'm not sure that our communication is being limited, more that it's evolving...it's becoming as mechanized as our known world, which is a scary (as the unknown usually is), but also interesting idea.
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