Hei Tapio -- a gap as I was translocating back to Boulder... with all those
shiny-clad folks ;-) [a side note, Colorado is considered the most 'healthy'
state in the US in terms of obesity etc etc -- the statistics that define the
state today would have made it the most obese state by far in 1980... so it goes...]

> Here's the intriguing dual paradox; Shannon (and Weaver) model of
> communication was based on a mechanical telephone operating system (circuits
> that were either on or off). It lead (partially) to the theory of digital
> communication systems, and fair enough, this remains in the domain of signals
> and engineering. The first paradox is that the concept of digital
> communication thus was derived in analogy to a mechanical system. The second
> paradox, which is perhaps more so a tragedy or comedy of errors, was that the
> mathematical theory of communication became also a basis of human
> communication which it was never meant to be (already mentioned here). Hence
> several decades of sender-receiver-signal-noise model variations. While the
> task of engineering has been to reduce noise for perfect signal and
> reception, how could this be a base for human communication, experience and
> knowledge production where interpretation, debate and disagreement are vital,
> let alone emotions and affect? It took a few decades before Stewart Hall
> intervened, and a bit longer before Brenda Laurel's Computers as Theatre
> offered an articulated sense of interpretation, subjectivity, or agency in
> HCI.
>
> Shannon is not to be blamed for all the "noise" that came about from these
> paradoxes. If we look at models of human body/mind dualisms from the past
> centuries, we have been imagined as clockworks, steam engines, and with
> communication theory, as signal processors. Future media archeologists are
> likely to look at the communication model as a remnant of Cold War research
> and an analogy between computer systems and human life that did not sustain
> itself far into the 21st century. Or perhaps it is a profoundly human
> condition, to explain everyday practices through technical and scientific
> imaginaries while lacking powerful enough options.

Thanks for the comments! The following is a meditation on what you've brought up...

At some level, and at very practical levels, these are not imaginaries, in the
sense that the engineered world accedes to perfection only in the way that
engineering is a process of optimization of material/energy usage. Of course,
any kind of perfection is imperfect: total control absorbs all the energy a
system has to operate itself. As you point out, these movements toward
perfection, models themselves, are *simulations* of reality. I believe that
early analysts in the Cold War knew precisely that they were models, simulations
and it was only later, when the ideas were passed across outside the
disciplines, sold on to consumers who had no clue of the origins of the things
that they consumed, were the origins lost.

Engineering simulations were tested frequently by the realities of engineering
application -- resulting in failure and success -- where the successes became
the fabric of the techno-social system that we are heavily embedded with in the
moment. One doesn't want to have humanistic subjectivity intrude into the
process if one is relying on a statistical failure rate of an engineered
component. That is the essence of engineering. Of course, though, the human
enters all these equations!

As for the communications model, again, I believe that the original engineers
knew this intuitively, that the models were not the thing itself -- as they, the
engineers, themselves existed before those models did. They existed across the
continuum from unmodeled analog reality-as-known-at-the-time (mechanistic!) to
the time after mathematical/digital modeling and simulation. [I've been looking
at this transition period quite closely from 1950 - 1965 in the context of my
father's early Cold War work on simulating/modeling of nuclear deterrent and
ICBM strategies -- they were very well aware of the contingencies of a
continuous analog reality that was full of instabilities -- and the simulation
work can be seen in the Light of it merely being another way to optimize
survival in that basic evolutionary sense... etc] Subsequent derivations moving
from simulation to simulation-of-simulation and beyond (as DeBord hints at with
the Spectacle) completely lose sight of the originary analog impulse/event -- we
are in such a time. Where people watch youtube remixes about the creation of
media programs about media producers who are creating mediated expressions about
their memories of what they experienced when consuming media in their childhood.

What you have framed is one reason why I have shifted to a wholistic
energy/flow-based model of the techno-social system which seamlessly reminds us
that things going on in mind are *not* at all disconnected with body, nor social
system, nor cosmos.

cheers,
jh