The Medium, the Message, and the Mind

This salon with Alex Danco will be all about Information.

We’ll start by covering Claude Shannon’s Information Theory – really wrap our heads around what it means when we say, “Information isn’t what you say, it’s what’s understood.” It’s not a noun, it’s a verb; it’s not the baseball, it’s the pitch. We’ll cover Information as Resolution of Uncertainty, which is the right way to think about what information really is, and why that matters. And we’ll try our best to understand one of the hardest, but most important ideas of the information age: What is Entropy?

We’ll spend some time talking about human perception, how we process incoming information and how we resolve uncertainty about the world around us. We’ll use this understanding as a foothold to tackle a little bit of Marshall McLuhan, and really understand, from a neuroscience perspective, what he meant by “Hot” and “Cool” media. It does not mean what most people think it does.

Then we’ll end on the ideas of Information as Capital, and Information as Life: what it means for information (or low-entropy) to propagate forward in time.

See you there!

No reading ahead is necessary, but you can check out these blog posts if you like:

The Audio Revolution

Life is Made of Unfair Coin Flips

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