Claude Elwood Shannon was a mathematician who was born in Gaylord, Michigan, and died in February 2001 in Medford, Massachusetts. My web site, writing, and performances are science fictions based on Claude Shannon’s life and theories. In my science fictions, i project him through his theory of communication into the 21^st century, where he takes different physical and embodied forms.

Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver wrote together The Mathematical Theory of Communication was published by Bell Labs in 1949. Their paper, (including a graphical representation of information) went on to form the substructure of all digital communication technologies developed in the United States. This binary and view of information and communication (and communication as information) was subsequently exported to the rest of the world.

One important characteristic of the Shannon/Weaver model is that it separates context from meaning…as articulated by Kathryn Hayles in How We Became Posthuman, it “disembodies” information by removing information from its context.[i] In addition, it privileges signal over noise in a binary explanation of information. The image of communication theory in the Shannon/Weaver paper appears more efficient at first glance but has the cumulative effect of removing complexity from the picture, and replacing it with a box called “noise”.[ii]

Although other mathematical information theories were being developed during the same time period, (one by Donald MacKay in England which took context and information into account to create meaning) they didn't achieve the dominance of the Shannon/Weaver theory of information that was developed in the United States at Bell Labs.[iii] The basis of my work is a critique and analysis of the Shannon/Weaver model of information through science studies, feminism, art, and science fiction.

[i] Both N. Katherine Hayles in How We Became Posthuman and John Fiske in Introduction to Communication Studies critique the Shannon/Weaver model of communication for removing meaning and context from the message. Fiske says “The question for us, however, is how useful is a theory with this sort of mechanistic base can be in the broader study of communication” p. 10.