Information
Bernard Geoghegan
I think perhaps the word ‘information’ is causing more trouble in this connection than it is worth, except that it is so difficult to find another that is anywhere near right.
—Claude Shannon
Information as keyword—digital or otherwise—did not exist before the twentieth century. Despite the fact that philological forerunners can be found in ancient Greek and Latin texts and the word information appears in some medieval European languages, these terms excited little systematic reflection before the twentieth century. Then, unexpectedly, in the 1920s this formerly unmarked and unremarkable concept became a focal point of widespread scientific and mathematical investigation.1 In 1948 mathematician Claude E. Shannon of the Bell Telephone Laboratories put forth an enduring account of information in terms of discrete, serial patterns amenable to statistical description, measurable in terms of binary digits (or bits). Information, as the Bell engineer understood, was manageable in terms of coding schemas adapted to the characteristics of the transmitting channel. Over the next few decades this account came to dominate definitions of communication in the sciences and in engineering.2 Supplementary movements to found schools of information, disciplines of informatics, and to conceptualize the characteristics of an emerging information society followed.3 This essay examines the changes in natural philosophy, science, and industry that allowed information to emerge as an entity and as a keyword.4
Medieval and Early Modern Information
When the word information entered Middle English in the fourteenth century, it took its place within a scholastic cosmology wherein resemblance “organized the play of symbols [and] made possible knowledge of things.”5 Derived from Latin informare, information denoted the imparting of form onto matter. In the earliest extant reference to information in English, dating from 1387, John Trevisa wrote that “fyve bookes com doun from heven for informacioun of mankinde.” It nearly misses the point to suggest that medieval information did not “yet” define information in terms of stable, discrete, and serial units for the simple fact that such a conception of medial difference and identity did not yet exist (nor was there any reason to believe such a definition was destined to someday appear). To cite one medium of the period as example, the illuminated medieval manuscript, Jean-François Lyotard has observed that its inscriptions consisted “of differences, which [could not] be transcribed into stable oppositions.”6 Impressions, superimpositions, colors, and a play of lines and figures irreducible to any rational mathematical calculus dominated the page. It would have made no sense to define this play of differences in terms of a stable informational value, be it rational-mathematical or empirical-factual. Information and transmission had more to do with inspiration, or the imparting of intelligible qualities. In this vein the monk William Bonde asserted in 1530 that Christian apostles made their “Crede by instinccyon & informacyon of the holy goost.”7 Repetition and similitude are not the source for information; rather they are the quintessence of its form.
As resemblance lost its grip on the European epistemological imaginary in the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, an emerging class of natural scientists began to submit traces to schemes of rational and systematic analysis.8 This technique belonged to a creeping dissatisfaction with explanations of the world in terms of chains of resemblances emanating from divinity. Matter began to take on a brittle and visceral character available for worldly observation and measurement. Eighteenth-century philosopher David Hume signaled how this changing conception shaped the understanding and definition of traces when he identified the term information with more or less arbitrary sensory impressions that became intelligible only when submitted to “abstract reasoning or reflection.”9 According to Hume’s conception of information, an immaterial form continued to suffuse matter, but the reasoning labors of the human mind—rather than the tracing of spiritual origins—assumed the task of identifying its features. Analogical procedures of in-forming no longer imparted intelligibility; instead, schemes of rational analysis brought order to impressions adrift in empires of empiricist signs. Philosopher Michel Foucault identified Hume’s analytical strategy with a broader effort in early modern thought to establish identities through a “means of measurement with a common unit, or, more radically, by its position in an order.”10 The undoing of the great chain of resemblance extended from heaven to earth would ultimately disclose new strings statistically distributed in earthly matter.
Tracing with Telegraphy in the Nineteenth Century
In the nineteenth century technologies of automated inscription took up the analytical slack of exasperated empirical philosophers. Telegraphy—the technique of writing at a distance, often through recourse to electrical signals—took the lead in delineating patterns and series that would eventually be called information. The adaption of telegraphic instruments for inscription and transmission in fields such as physiology, electromagnetism, linguistics, metrology (the science of measurement), spiritualism, and commodity trading generated standardized and discrete traces available for description in technological and mathematical terms.11 Telegraphic tracing allowed proto-informational measurements of the world.
Three features of telegraphy proved decisive in creating informational entities: instrumentation, graphical standardization, and economization. Classical tools such as a hammer or a fountain pen invested each impression with singular qualities based in part on the human hand that wielded them. By contrast, the telegraphic instrument invested entities with mathematically determined, standard, uniform features. Schemes of mathematical and industrial efficiency organized factors such as the patterning and spacing of letters, and the frequency of distribution among dots and dashes. Applied to diverse phenomena such as nerve transmissions and railway-switching commands, telegraphy gradually invested a wide range of singular entities with comparable scriptural properties that could be compared to one another.12 Under telegraphic conditions written language, the actions of the nervous system, and the movements of the stock market all are reduced to binary discrete notations agreed upon in advance by sender and receiver.13 Industrial economization provided an imperative for developing a common system of measurement to explain the abstract forms and laws governing the patterning and distributions of these signals. Firms such as the American Telephone and Telegraph Company encouraged engineers to maximize profits by identifying the minimum data and infrastructure necessary to serve customers.14 In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries engineers initially referred to the data of transmissions as intelligence, swapping out that term for information only as it became clear that intelligibility to humans was not necessarily a factor in discerning these patterns.
The Handbook of the Telegraph published in London in 1862 illustrates how telegraphy tended to turn all communications into standardized, quantifiable traces. The guide advises would-be telegraphic clerks that excellent handwriting and basic competency in mathematics (skills associated with creating a standardized and quantified chain of reproduction) will aid them in their quest to become communications professionals. Most remarkable is the one skill it identifies as nonessential: the ability to speak or understand the language being telegraphed. “An ‘instrument clerk,’ ” the manual explains, “may be quite competent to telegraph or receive a dispatch in a foreign language and yet not understand a single world of it.”15 What matters is the ability to process discrete letters and patterns with machinelike efficiency and total indifference to the social, cultural, and geographic specificities of clients. “Constant practice,” the manual explains, “enables [the telegraph clerk] to signal, i. e. to send and receive messages . . . with the rapidity of lightning, hence annihilating distance and concentrating time, conveying tidings of the movements of an army, the rise and fall of dynasties, or the desires of a peasant, with like facility and marvelous speed.”16
The creation of standardized technical traces operated most evidently at the level of the Morse code, which employed short notations for frequently used letters such as a, e, and s and longer notation for infrequently used letters such as x and z.17 Such coding strategies took for granted that signals should be economical and standardized. Typically this meant introducing modes of technical “compression,” which communications historian Jonathan Sterne defines as “the process that renders a mode of representation adequate to its infrastructures.”18 This adaptation did not stop at communicated content. Ultimately engineers refashioned transducers, wires, and clerks’ bodies as standard equipment for industrialized communications.19 For example, one study by an engineer at Bell Telephone Laboratories observed that Morse code involved “a tradeoff between code speed and the mean number of hand motions per transmitted letter.” Thus even mathematical inefficiencies in Morse code came down to the strategic decision to accommodate the limits of the human channel.20
Theorizing Information in the 1920s
The techniques of telegraphy proved more enduring than the electrical telegraph. In the twentieth century, as the economic power of telegraphy waned, the epistemic status of its techniques waxed. Engineers generalized telegraphic methods of instrumentation and economization into a general theory of information applicable across diverse infrastructures.21 In the 1928 essay “Transmission of Information” Ralph Hartley of the Bell Telephone System proposed substituting for the cognitively connoted term engineers typically applied to transmission patterns, intelligence, the less anthropocentric term information. Hartley reasoned that human cognition should not feature in the definition of signals. He cited the example of a hand-operated submarine capable of transmitting both messages composed by human beings and those generated by an automatic selecting device. The receiver of such a signal does not assign meaning to the message but only decodes its sequence. Therefore, Hartley posited, “we should ignore the question of interpretation . . . and base our result on the possibility of the receiver’s distinguishing the result of selecting any one symbol from that of selecting any other. By this means the psychological factors and their variations are eliminated and it becomes possible to set up a definite quantitative measure of information.”22
Scrubbing away psychology allowed Hartley to offer a mathematical definition of information applicable to all serially patterned transmissions. He posited that
H = n log s,
wherein H designated the quantity of information associated with n selections, and s stood for the total number of possible selections for a given symbol. This equation defined communication as the unidirectional transmission of serial and discrete messages from a predefined set of symbols. This definition was intuitive for telegraphy, but, Hartley observed, “when we attempt to extend this idea to other forms of communication certain generalizations need to be made.”23 In analyses of media including telephony and television, Hartley showed how communications could be construed as serial representations from a predetermined range of symbolic options. He cited the tendency of these and other forms of electrical communications to render continuous flows from a source as serial, discrete, and predefined coding options. In one of his more peculiar examples of information structures and the relative patterns and freedoms of such selection, Hartley asserted, “In the sentence, ‘Apples are red,’ the first word eliminates other kinds of fruit and all other objects in general.”24 Thus even spontaneous, ostensibly noncoded and nontechnical communications situations lost their apparently expressive kernel and were replaced by a series of alternating, differential selections. Telegraphy was no longer an informational medium for transmitting speech and meaning; speech and meaning became a medium for the production of telegraphic information.
Information Reformation from 1948
The late 1940s witnessed a groundswell of interest in defining the “stuff” of communications. Widespread and interdisciplinary research into cryptography, computing, radar, and fire control during World War II had stimulated interest in a more precise scientific account of the fundamental laws governing technical communication. Researchers such as Alan Turing, Norbert Wiener, and Claude Shannon worked on diverse communication systems during the war, adapting techniques and conceptions from earlier initiatives to the task at hand, which cultivated an interest in making sense of these common laws. Experience and practice indicated commonalities, but the name or rule of these shared conditions escaped scientific definition. After World War II, information emerged as a keyword for defining that commonality. In 1948, at least eight competing accounts of information appeared in prestigious English, British, US-American, and French journals.25 Claude Shannon of Bell Telephone Laboratories put forth the most influential account. In the opening lines of his 1948 essay “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” published in AT&T’s Bell System Technical Journal, Shannon asserted that “the fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point.” Shannon made crucial additions to the work of Hartley, including demonstrations of the statistically predictable character of communication signals, showing how redundancy and variable transmission rates could ensure error-free communications, specifying the capacity of communication channels, identifying information with entropy, and postulating binary digits or bits as the most economical measure of transmissions. Throughout the analysis Shannon relied on an analytical framework couched in digital terms (e.g., binary digits) but applicable to analog communications.
When Shannon’s theory of communication appeared, it was celebrated but also regarded as a theoretical study of limited practical applicability.26 His methods of reducing errors through improved coding required expensive digital computers unavailable for general industrial purposes. By the end of the 1950s, engineers widely accepted Shannon as offering the most comprehensive scientific basis for a theory of information, but there was still little expectation of widely implementing the error-correction codes and efficiencies imagined by his analysis. Widespread application appeared only in the 1980s, when falling prices of computers made the development and use of sophisticated digital coding mechanisms economically viable.
The transition from concepts of telegraphic intelligence to information as a digital keyword was neither direct nor inevitable. Norbert Wiener, who had received his PhD in philosophy and studied with Edmund Husserl and Bertrand Russell, argued for situating information theories within a grand program of scientific and conceptual synthesis that he termed cybernetics.27 Wiener proposed a conception of information that was not digital in any essential sense but drew instead on interdisciplinary knowledge to counter scientific specialization.28 The British physicist Donald MacKay, who worked in radar research during the war, developed a theory of information that drew on Wittgenstein and Calvinist theology for inspiration.29 Despite these theories’ relative resistance to a narrow and technicist conception of information, neither of them really offered a radical critique or alternative to telegraphic reasoning. Both definitions identified information with technical instrumentation, graphical standardization, and economic standardization. In other words, their “alternatives” remained grounded in a communicative cosmology—backlit by the techniques of telegraphy that rested, in turn, upon the analytical strategies of early modern natural philosophy—that had privileged Shannon’s methods as the heir apparent to the information for the emerging information age.
See in this volume: archive, cloud, culture, digital, flow, sharing
See in Williams: bureaucracy, capitalism, communication, empirical, standards
Notes
Lisa Åkervall and Ben Peters provided incisive commentaries that improved the ideas and phrasing throughout this essay. I thank them for their generous assistance, as well as the Internationales Kolleg für Kulturtechnikforschung und Medienphilosophie for a fellowship that supported the research and writing of this essay.
1The most instructive and comprehensive accounts of the rise of a scientific definition of information are Friedrich-Wilhelm Hagemeyer, “Die Entstehung von Informationskonzepten in der Nachrichtentechnik” (Free University of Berlin, 1979); William Aspray, “The Scientific Conceptualization of Information,” Annals of the History of Computing 7(2) (1985): 117–40; Jérôme Segal, Le Zéro et le Un: Histoire de la notion scientifique d’information au 20e siècle (Paris: Editions Syllepse, 2003); John Durham Peters, “Information: Notes toward a Critical History,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 12(2) (July 1988): 9–23; and Sergio Verdú, “Fifty Years of Shannon Theory,” IEEE Transactions on Information Theory 44(6) (1998): 2057–78.
2See Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan, “The Historiographic Conception of Information: A Critical Survey,” IEEE Annals on the History of Computing 30(1) (2008): 66–81.
3Ronald Kline discusses intersections between the rise of information theory and schools of information science in “What Is Information Theory a Theory Of? Boundary Work among Scientists in the United States and Britain during the Cold War,” in The History and Heritage of Scientific and Technical Information Systems: Proceedings of the 2002 Conference, Chemical Heritage Foundation, ed. W. Boyd Rayward and Mary Ellen Bowden (Medford, NJ: Information Today, 2004), 19–24; For an early invocation of the information age, see Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 36. On the characteristics of an information society, see Daniel Bell, “The Social Framework of the Information Society,” in The Computer Age: A 20 Year View, ed. M. L. Dertoozos and J. Moses (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1979), 500–549.
4Technical media or technische Medien is something of a term of art in Germanophone media studies for communications defined by abstract coding systems that are automated and manipulated with relative autonomy from the human sensorium. Friedrich Kittler identifies the rise of organized, intensively deployed and exploited technical media with the rise of telegraphy. See the bilingual German/English account of this change in Friedrich Kittler, “Geschichte der Kommunikationsmedien,” in Kunst im Netz, ed. Jörg Huber and Alois Martin (Graz,1993), 73–79.
5Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), 17. Tom Gunning discusses the significance of this passage in his forthcoming book, which he presented in part as “Inventing the Moving Image (and Forgetting it Again),” Bauhaus University-Weimar, June 2010. I thank Professor Gunning for informing my argument and analysis here.
6Cited in Helga Lutz and Bernhard Siegert, “The Ontogenetic Potential of Lines” (unpublished paper).
7These usages and the definition of information come from the OED entry on information.
8The most in-depth analysis of this transformation, with a particular concern for the rise of information as a scientific and technological concept, is Bernhard Siegert, Passage des Digitalen: Zeichenpraktiken der neuzeitlichen Wissenschaften 1500–1900 (Berlin: Brinkmann & Bose, 2003).
9David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960), 69–70. Emphasis added.
10Foucault, The Order of Things, 55.
11The most current and comprehensive account of how telegraphy transformed the situation of the sciences, with profound implications for theories of media, is Florian Sprenger, Medien des Immediaten: Elektrizität, Telegraphie, McLuhan (Berlin: Kadmos, 2012), 205–330. On electricity, electromagnetism, and telegraphy, with special reference to imperialism and nineteenth-century commerce, see M. Norton Wise, “Mediating Machines,” Science in Context 2(1) (1988): 77–113; on metrology and telegraphy, Simon Schaffer, “Late Victorian Metrology and Its Instrumentation: A Manufactory of Ohms,” in Invisible Connections: Instruments, Institutions, and Science, ed. Robert Bud and Susan Cozzens (Bellingham, WA: Spie Optical Engineering Press, 1992), 23–56; on physiology and telegraphy, see Timothy Lenoir, “Helmholtz and the Materialities of Communication,” Osiris 9 (1994): 185–207; on spiritualism, electrical experimentation, and telegraphy, see Richard J. Noakes, “Telegraphy Is an Occult Art: Cromwell Fleetwood Varley and the Diffusion of Electricity to the Other World,” British Journal for the History of Science 32(4) (1999): 421–59; on telegraphy and the changing epistemology of the natural sciences, see Siegert, Passage des Digitalen, 334–36 and 359–67.
12Instruments and instrumentation have been a site of focused research in recent decades. See Don Ihde, Instrumental Realism: The Interface between Philosophy of Science and Philosophy of Technology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991); Albert van Helden and Thomas L. Hankins, eds., Osiris 9 (1994); and Thomas L. Hankins and Robert J. Silverman, Instruments and the Imagination (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995).
13On the role of standardization in creating objects for organized scientific inquiry, see Joan H. Fujimura, “Crafting Science: Standardized Packages, Boundary Objects, and ‘Translation,’ ” in Science as Practice and Culture, ed. Andrew Pickering (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 168–211; and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, “Scrips and Scribbles,” MLN 118(3) (April 1, 2003): 622–36. For discussions of how media take part in producing standardized traces, see Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 1–68.
14Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: The Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, NC: Duke University of Press, 2002), 32–60.
15R. Bond, The Handbook of the Telegraph, Being a Manual of Telegraphy, Telegraph Clerks’ Remembrancer, and Guide to Candidates for Employment in the Telegraph Service (London: Virtue Brothers & Co., 1862), 1.
16Ibid., 2.
17In fact, there were a variety of Morse codes and only gradually were they standardized into binary representational schemes. For a discussion of these codes and their relative efficiency, see E. N. Gilbert, “How Good Is Morse Code?” Information and Control, no. 14 (1969): 559–65.
18See Jonathan Sterne, “Compression: A Loose History,” in Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures, ed. Lisa Parks and Nicole Starosielski (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015), 35. For further details on the reconceptualization of language in terms of rational efficiency, see the extraordinary discussion of telegraphy and coding throughout this essay.
19Kate Maddalena and Jeremy Packer, “The Digital Body: Telegraphy as Discourse Network,” Theory, Culture & Society 32(1) (January 2015): 93–117.
20On this point, see Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 2.
21Thomas Macho notes that such conceptual belatedness is a hallmark of cultural techniques. See Thomas Macho, “Zeit und Zahl: Kalender- und Zeitrechnung als Kulturtechniken,” in Bild, Schrift, Zahl, ed. Sybille Krämer and Horst Bredekamp (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2008), 179.
22Ralph V. Hartley, “Transmission of Information,” Bell System Technical Journal, no. 7 (1928): 538.
23Ibid., 542.
24Ibid., 536.
25Verdú, “Fifty Years of Shannon Theory,” 2058.
26See James L Massey, “Deep-Space Communications and Coding: A Marriage Made in Heaven,” in Advanced Methods for Satellite and Deep Space Communications, ed. Joachim Hagenauer (Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag, 1992), 1–17.
27See Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: Or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1948); and Norbert Wiener, “The Mathematical Theory of Communication [Review],” Physics Today 3 (September 1950): 31–32.
28Norbert Wiener, “What Is Information Theory?” I. R. E. Transactions on Information Theory, June 1956, 48.
29See Donald M. MacKay, Information, Mechanism and Meaning (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969), 2–3; Donald MacKay, The Clockwork Image: A Christian Perspective on Science (Leicester: Inter-Varsity Press, 1974); and Paul Helm, “The Contribution of Donald MacKay,” Evangel 7(4) (1989): 11–13.