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Information Theory


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Posted by Ross Hall on March 03, 1998 at 14:49:59:

I was reading "Web of Life" by Fritjof Capra when I encountered this passage....

"An important part of cybernetics was the theory of information developed by Norbert Wiener and Claude Shannon in the late 1940s. It originated in Shannon's attempts at the Bell Telephone Laboratories to define and measure amounts of information transmitted through telegraph and telephone lines in order to estimate efficiencies and establish a basis for charging for messages.

"The term "information" is used in information theory in a highly technical sense, which is quite different from our everyday use of the word and has nothing to do with meaning. This has resulted in endless confusion. According to Heinz von Foerster, a regular participant at the the Macy Conferences and editor of the written proceedings, the whole problem is based on a linguistic error - the confusion between "information" and "signal," which led the cyberneticists to call their theory a theory of information rather than a theory of signals.

"Information theory, then, is mainly concerned with the problems of how to get a message, coded as a signal, through a noisy channel. However, Norbert Wiener also emphasised the fact that such a coded message is essentially a pattern of organisation, and by drawing an analogy between such patterns of communication and patterns of organisation in organisms he further prepared the ground for thinking about living systems in terms of patterns."

As many of the practioners I have met in the UK seem to have a firm grounding in Information Theory I wonder if this apparent "misinterpretation" of the meaning of the theory has had any impact on the way that KM is actually progressing and perception of the theory and practices.

Ross ;-))


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