Today we take for granted platitudes such as, "the world is made of information." But only a few decades ago, such phrases would have made very little sense to anyone. Even today, most people who repeat such commonplaces really could not tell you very much about what exactly information is. We talk to each other everyday and assume we are communicating, but are we really? The precise nature of information is a very recent discovery. Arguably it is one of the most crucial discoveries that would lead to what we now call the Information Age. The nature of information was formalized in 1948 by Claude Shannon, working at Bell Labs. It is an alluring story that has already been told better than I could tell it here, although we should try to better understand the political implications. Probably the best, short, intuitive definition of information was written by Gregory Bateson: "a difference which makes a difference." If I tell you something you already know, I'm not giving you information; that would be a difference that does not make a difference. If I tell you something you do not already know, I would be giving you information. Your world would change, ever so slightly. But any message or signal can have more or less information content. David Krakauer of the Santa Fe Institute provides the following example to help build your intuition of this idea. If you want to find a specific location--say, my flat in Southampton--you could just drive all over Southampton randomly until you find it. That would take a lot of time, with a lot of error, before you eventually found it. But what if I drew you a map from where you are now, at the university, to my flat, with arrows along the streets you should take and a circle around where my flat is located? The information content of the map can be measured by *the amount of time the map saved you. Claude Shannon mathematically formalized this basic intution, and laid the groundwork for any number of technological advancements based on the increasingly sophisticated command of information. Shannon's mathematical theory of information is way above my pay grade, and for our purposes there is no need to grapple with any of the mathematics, but it is necessary to build up an intuitive sense of this new way to think about information and communication. We should also try to gain a sense of the political context and the political, historical consequences that flow from this model of information and communication. ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDXSCV6xW-A

Data sources and techniques you might use for research papers about the media. Lexis/Nexis for newspaper data, cross-national historical data on media technology penetration, Twitter data, Google Search results data Google N-Grams, etc. Newsletter: https://tinyletter.com/jmrphy Blog: http://jmrphy.net/blog Twitter: http://twitter.com/jmrphy Podcast: http://jmrphy.libsyn.com/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/otherlifenow/ Periscope: https://www.pscp.tv/jstnmrphy Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jstnmrphy/ ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQ_0GGOc2ds