Fibreculture Journal (Jan 2008)
Regaining Weaver and Shannon
Abstract
My claim is that communication considered from the standpoint of how it is modeled must not only reckon with Claude E. Shannon and Warren Weaver but regain their pioneering efforts in new ways. I want to regain two neglected features. I signal these ends by simply reversing the order in which their names commonly appear.First, the recontextualization of Shannon and Weaver requires an investigation of the technocultural scene of information ‘handling’ embedded in their groundbreaking postwar labours; not incidentally, it was Harold D. Lasswell, whose work in the 1940s is often linked with Shannon and Weaver’s, who made a point of distinguishing between those who affect the content of messages (controllers) as opposed to those who handle without modifying (other than accidentally) such messages. Although it will not be possible to maintain such a hard and fast distinction that ignores scenes of encoding and decoding, Lasswell’s (1964: 42-3) examples of handlers include key figures such as ‘dispatchers, linemen, and messengers connected with telegraphic communication’ whose activities will prove to be important for my reading of the Shannon and Weaver essays. Telegraphy and its occupational cultures are the technosocial scenes informing the Shannon and Weaver model.Second, I will pay special attention to Weaver’s contribution, despite a tendency to erase him altogether by means of a general scientific habit of listing the main author first and then attributing authorship only to the first name on the list (although this differs within scientific disciplines, particularly in the health field where the name of the last author is in the lead, so to speak). I begin with a displacement of hierarchy and authority. I am inclined to simply state for those who, in the manner of Sherlock Holmes, ‘know my method’, that I focus my attention on the less well-known half of thinking pairs – on Roger Caillois instead of Georges Bataille, on Félix Guattari rather than Gilles Deleuze. In the absence of my own sympathetic Watson, I will provide two detailed accounts of the effects of this reordering of names and reprioritizing of features. Weaver’s task was to communicate about the mathematical model in non-technical terms; he did this in the original writings on the model and much later in his career as a scientific proselytizer. He was assigned this later task by the president of the Rockefeller Foundation and didn’t realize, by his own admission, was he was getting into; yet, he managed to produce several versions of explanatory texts as well as theorize about popular scientific writing (Weaver, 1967). This displacement of authority allows me to circle back to an older technology, namely telegraphy, that newly figures in the regained history of the mathematical model I am offering here. This both unfixes the scholarly preoccupation with telephony under the sign of Ma Bell, and foregrounds the service environment of the telegram office that influenced the model in the first place and recurred in later reflections on it in the second place.
