Claude Shannon (1916–2001)

I've read this book a long time ago, primarily to understand better complex adaptive systems in light of social interaction information processing. The models contained herein may be applied sufficiently in theories on how information is reaching "liminal crititical thresholds" in a cognitive setting, depending on how the message is distributed. It is useful also in media studies, cognitive science, neural networks, general semantics, NLP and day-to-day "raw" communication, to see how the signal loaded with a message interacts with a given audience and what is the probability that a given piece of information will influence a given group or individual, or the message will be "voided" either by cognitive resilience, critical inspection, detachment, flood of other messages, conflicting info (cognitive dissonance), information deflation (as in information treated as a tool of "small-talk" interaction with no rhetorical influence whatsoever, as in modern day social networking sites). Excellent read.… (más)

I've read this book a long time ago, primarily to understand better complex adaptive systems in light of social interaction information processing. The models contained herein may be applied sufficiently in theories on how information is reaching "liminal crititical thresholds" in a cognitive setting, depending on how the message is distributed. It is useful also in media studies, cognitive science, neural networks, general semantics, NLP and day-to-day "raw" communication, to see how the signal loaded with a message interacts with a given audience and what is the probability that a given piece of information will influence a given group or individual, or the message will be "voided" either by cognitive resilience, critical inspection, detachment, flood of other messages, conflicting info (cognitive dissonance), information deflation (as in information treated as a tool of "small-talk" interaction with no rhetorical influence whatsoever, as in modern day social networking sites). Excellent read.… (más)

This book contains the landmark paper called "The Mathematical Theory of Communication" written by Claude E. Shannon back in 1948. In it are the equations that define channel capacity and other such things. It is quite interesting, since the first part contains some additional information written by Warren Weaver. The book itself contains some mathematics, as you might be able to tell from the title of the book. There are some logarithms in there and some Calculus, so it isn't for those that despise math. However, as I said, the initial part by Weaver does explain some of the implications of Shannon's findings without going into the math part of it.

Would definitely read again if given the time.… (más)