Understanding Claude Shannon's Theory

Before yesterday I considered information to be understood the way it is defined in the dictionary as the knowledge communicated concerning a particular fact or circumstance. In my own words I would explain information to be facts that are sought and then learned, but when considering the idea to measure information we must look at it from a different angle. Information is the measure of uncertainty. When there is less amount of uncertainty there is less information. In order to understand what information is we need to resolve uncertainty. We are defining information by what we don’t have but need to obtain. This was the idea when Claude Shannon came around. His thesis adviser suggested that the way his theory would be successful was if he made his thesis the opposite of entropy. Entropy is often interpreted as, the amount of disorder or randomness in a system, or the gradual decline into disorder or most commonly the lack of order. I found all of this to be very interesting. Understanding Shannon’s theory has helped me to recognize when dealing with communication many things need to be taken into consideration. One thing that needs to be taken into consideration when dealing with information and communication is that the point of view matters. The point of view can be subjective. Something for one person may not contain any information for them particularly because they already have knowledge of this, where for another person it may have information because they have no knowledge on that subject. Another thing that needs to be considered is that although the sender and the receiver during the communication may have been perfect, the quality of the message loses value from when it is sent, to when it is received. The loss in value in the transmission is due to entropy. Entropy is a form of noise in the transmission and it is inevitable that the value of the message degrades. We must take all of this into consideration when communicating and I find this to be a very important part of transmission to understand. Without this knowledge we may find it difficult to understand why a communication is never one hundred percent.