I am writing these words, typing away on a keyboard, and my thoughts appear as words on my screen. Technology can take my written/typed out thoughts and transfer them almost anywhere. It breaks my words up into small packets and delivers them to a destination, in this case some server that holds my blog posts, and enables them to be viewed by anyone with an internet connection and a desire to read obscure blog posts.
This is possible thanks to a lot of different people and inventions, one of the biggest contributors in all this was Claude Shannon. Shannon was able to turn messages into small packets, by simply asking yes or no questions, and therefore making it possible for information to be transmitted. Shannon was radical in that he separated information from its context and messages from their meaning. Sorry I don’t understand it well enough to adequately write about it, moving on. I originally had some way to connect this to thoughts that I had about the meaning of a message being more than the physical message itself, it also has a lot to do with the source of message. My brain must be trying to make me look bad. Okay, no fancy segue into this, I think a large part of a messages importance is where the message comes from.
Most teachers won’t let students use Wikipedia as a reference source, but Wikipedia lists a lot of correct knowledge. A student can reference a quote from a book and it will be taken more seriously than if the student references a quote from Wikipedia.
The Bible also provides a good example of the source being an important factor of a message, do I have to explain why…? Fine, the Bible is taken as law to those who follow the Bible’s teachings whereas a book about how to follow the Bible is taken as a guide, even if it directly quotes the Bible.
Or take for example getting an email from your boss that says “Great job!” versus getting a spam email from some company that say, “Great job! You’ve earned enough points to buy more crap from our store!”
The source is important, also necessary.
I was going to try and write a poem but I didn’t get any farther than, “The source is of course…”
*This blog post is not under copyright*