The Basic Patterns of Digital Communication
What conceptual breakthrough were responsible for the creation of digital infrastructure? How do those fundamental patterns deepen technocracy?
In order for computers to compute and share information, a formation of symbols and instructions must occur.
The presence or absence of the flow of electrons through a mechanical gate in a circuit board enables the formation of a binary language which is used as cues for a machine to process. The gate is either on or off, creating an extremely polar perception of reality based on separation. From there, engineers form higher levels of abstraction, expressing the 0 and 1 language in something more familiar to a person. For example binary language represents letters by utilizing a standardized 8-bit scheme where various combinations of 0s and 1s form letters (A is 01000001).
The use of binary symbology for the encoding of information/communication is generally credited to Claude Shannon's breakthrough contribution A Mathematical Theory of Information. This paper provides the necessary breakthroughs for essentially all modern digital communication.
The engineer's concerns revolved around error free data transmission, Shannon stated the fundamental issue of communication as, “… reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point”. The semantic consideration of these messages were considered irrelevant to the problem of their reproduction. Rather than a theory explaining what information is, Claude focuses exclusively on the transmission and reproduction of "data", which is this case is restricted to binary units.
Shannon started by grounding a general model for any communication system. This model consisted of five parts; a source, transmitter, channel, receiver and destination.
The source generates messages.
The transmitter transforms the message into a signal suitable for the channel. Encoded (as 0s and 1s).
The channel is the medium of transmission, and could be anything capable of capturing the signal. In our society this is often a wire or an electromagnetic wave.
The receiver does the opposite of the transmitter, by receiving the signal and decoding it to the message.
The destination is where the receiver passes the message.
With this basic schematic, Shannon went on to form mathematical relationships describing the states, properties and probabilities of these five generalized parts.
For measuring information Shannon used log base 2 which creates binary digits. This employs discrete mathematics which helps avoid the infinities of real numbers between 0 and 1, as seen in continuous mathematics. (Glattfelder J.B. (2019) A Universe Built of Information. In: Information—Consciousness—Reality. The Frontiers Collection. Springer, Cham).
Digitizing society pursues the separation of energy, into controllable units, increasing the power of those who control the various mechanisms and infrastructure of abstraction. Building from this sort of pattern inevitably requires the technocratic elites organize, maintain and innovate on this complex hierarchy of machines and network infrastructure. As activities such as media, payments, investments, and organizing become further digitalized, the regulatory power increasingly moves towards the institutions maintaining the bulk of the infrastructure/hardware and away from traditional governments.
Traditional governments cannot compete (no matter how democratically formed) due to knowledge and resource barriers, so they intermesh with the corporate institutions. In order to stay efficient and powerful governments adopt the technology, which deepens the dependency.
Unconditional love and recognizing the uniqueness of each moment serves as an anathema to excessively organized structures based on principles of separation/abstraction. Viewing reality fundamentally as separate components invites emotional, mental, and environmental disharmony. This powerful technology invites all sorts of beautiful possibilities, but we need to remain aware of the basic patterns so we do not lose ourselves.