I really like the use of Shannon’s communication/noise model for thinking about the more complicated paradigms of exchange we see in instances of media and culture. Just as, in its more technical interpretation, it provides a theoretical basis on which computer scientists can study error-correcting codes and statisticians can study forecasting and regression, I think it’s useful to recontextualize it as a theoretical basis on which to study the cultural causations and implications of media, as we’ve been doing so far: we split a signal (some piece of media) into its ground truth (the “message” in Shannon’s model) and the layers of cultural influence that obscure, change, and complicate that truth (the noise).

I think it’s inherent in media to require this type of analysis because for an idea to be presented to an audience, it needs to be transported to them in compressed form. from the producer’s perspective, this happens on multiple levels: storage and bandwidth limitations usually require some data to be lost for the most important data to be delivered quickly, and time limitations require a producer to approximate ideas as best they can. Compression can be seen as noise, but subtractive noise—information is lost in and before transit, leaving gaps in the message to be filled in by the audience.

We were talking in class today about the notion of active producers and passive audience/consumers, and I wanted to talk more about how this dichotomy could be seen as incomplete; the audience’s act of filling in gaps in the message and creating their own ground truth is just that, active, whether conscious or not. I think it might be interesting to also view this act of interpolation as part of the noise in our media-culture Shannon model.

If this were true., noise in the media-culture relationship would not in fact be under any one actor’s control, due to the complexity of the feedback processes we discussed at length in class today. All parties involved affect how ideas evolve in transit and how they’re received in the end.

I’m excited to start looking at case studies in Media Worlds because I think that will be really instructive for further determining how a media-culture Shannon model would look.