Claude Shannon's 100th Birthday Post

image credit: en.wikipedia.org

I was going to write my last April A-Z Challenge post, but then I got distracted by today's Google Doodle. It's Claude Shannon's 100th birthday and I just had to celebrate it.

I've taught Shannon and Weaver's communication model for years in my Business Communication classes. Shannon's A Mathematical Theory of Communication began a revolution in Information Theory and introduced the concept of "noise" in the communication channel.

Shannon, in collaboration with Warren Weaver, conceived of a transmission model of communication that was elegant in its simplicity and widely applicable to all forms of communication. 

Here's the model:

image credit:ankarali.xyz

Shannon worked at Bell telephones and his original mathematical model was conceived for optimising information transmission over the telephone and later modified for general communication.

Say you're the source. The idea in your mind has to be "encoded" (into words, or pictures, or sounds or gestures) as a message and then "transmitted" via an appropriate "machine" (your voice box or a printer or a telephone handset) which translates your message into a signal (say, electrical in the case of the telephone or the printer) and passes it through a channel (in this case, air,) where there is always "noise" (any disturbance) that can distort the signal. The signal is received by another "machine" (your ear system or a printer or a telephone receiver). Of course, the receiving machine has to be compatible with the transmitting machine, otherwise the process won't work. The received signal is "decoded" back (into words, or pictures, or sounds or gestures) as it reaches its destination (the mind of the person you're sending the information to).

The original 1948 model did not have a feedback loop. This was added in 1951.

As a mathematician, Shannon was more information in the passing of "information." He admitted that he wasn't really concerned about the transmission of "meaning."

Shannon was also an inventor with a weird sense of humour. He once invented what he called "The Ultimate Machine." This machine did nothing. It just switched itself off if you switched it on!

The author, Dr. Ranee Kaur Banerjee, is Managing Partner of Expressions@Work, a studio for the development of communication and soft skills.