What Is A Message?

I have had problems with the context of the page about What's in a message?

I understand a message as an item which may be sent. So, I understand in the context of the (traditional) metaphor for communications as transmission of information, which considers an emitter, a channel, and a receptor (destination).

This metaphor, however useful, has very strict limitations, which make it inapplicable to many important domains.

What it assumes is that the information completely pre-exists the communications. It is the basis for Shannon's quantifiable theory of information. The transmission is measured as a degradation of this initial quantity of information, or with a signal per noise ratio.

In any case, this basic assumption is invalidated in practice in common communications, by the fact that spreading information modifies its value and thus its status. Communications thus creates information. It does it implicitly as a matter of fact, by raising the awareness about the items mentioned (in the trivial way in which one cannot use language without in the same time modifying it), but also more explicitly via the commitments which are made, or even only implied. The reality is not something external which would be there and talked about, but it is a set of conventions, and thus the living result of communications.

This is very much the way 'free' products are being marketed: creating needs around social phenomena.

-- MarcGirod - 16 Sep 2007