The Information

There is a progression from pictographic, writing the picture; to ideographic, writing the idea; and then logographic, writing the word.

This is a fact that now is.

In this time of conceptual change, mental readjustments were needed to understand the telegraph itself. Confusion inspired anecdotes, which often turned on awkward new meanings of familiar terms: innocent words like send, and heavily laden ones, like message. There was the woman who brought a dish of sauerkraut into the telegraph office in Karlsruhe to be “sent” to her son in Rastatt. She had heard of soldiers being “sent” to the front by telegraph. There was the man who brought a “message” into the telegraph office in Bangor, Maine. The operator manipulated the telegraph key and then placed the paper on the hook. The customer complained that the message had not been sent, because he could still see it hanging on the hook.

The more inherent order exists in a sample of English text—order in the form of statistical patterns, known consciously or unconsciously to speakers of the language—the more predictability there is, and in Shannon’s terms, the less information is conveyed by each subsequent letter. When the subject guesses the next letter with confidence, it is redundant, and the arrival of the letter contributes no new information. Information is surprise.