Three Quotes from Information Please

“My contention is that information increasingly appears in complex couplings of humans and machines. Culture can thus no longer be understood as separate from technology. If this is so, many assumptions long held in modern society require revision. One such assumption is that cultures are in essence national. Yet the emerging mode of information, tethering humans and machines, is recognizably global” (p.1).

Hybridity of cultural objects and their continual transformation in planetary exchanges now form the matrix of human experience" (p. 23).


The Internet enables planetary transmissions of cultural objects (texts, images, and sounds) to cross cultural boundaries with little “noise.” Communications now transpire with digital accuracy. The dream of the communications engineer is realized as information flows without interference from point on the earth to any other point or points. As Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver theorize: ‘The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point’ (Shannon and Weaver 1943,3). Cybernetic theory is seemingly fulfilled by the Internet: both machines and the human body act on the environment through ‘the accurate reproduction’ of information or signals, in an endless feedback loop that adjusts for changes and unexpected events (Wiener 1950).