Information as a fluxThe classic ap

Information as a flux

The classic approach of economists is to adopt a view of knowledge that allows it to be considered as a stock that is accumulated through interaction with an information flux.

The idea of an information flux is associated with Shannon and Weaver's (1949) influential mathematical model of communication. The origins of the theory lie with Shannon's work in Bell Laboratories in the 1940s (Shannon 1948). Shannon was primarily concerned with the problem of how to make the optimal use of the capacity provided by the company's telephone lines; the central problem was one of 'reproducing at one point, either exactly or approximately, a message selected at another point' where '... the actual message is one selected from a set of possible messages' (Shannon 1948: 5). According to the theory, the more of a message that was received, the higher would be the probability that the message selected from the set of possible messages was the same as the original.

In the theory, a message is treated as a stream of encoded characters transmitted from a source to a destination via a communication channel. The process begins with the sender who creates a message, which is then encoded and translated into a signal that is transmitted along the communication channel to a receiver, which decodes the message and reconstitutes it for a recipient. In principle, as long as a stable, shared syntax for encoding/decoding exists, the accuracy of the message is guaranteed. The sematic content of the message however is irrelevant to this process. As Shannon noted, 'Frequently the messages have meaning; that is they refer to or are correlated according to some system with certain physical or conceptual entities. These semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem' (Shannon 1948: 5).

In his theory, the term information had a narrow, specific, technical meaning. Information (equivalent to additional coded symbols being received) was simply something that reduced the uncertainty that the correct message would be selected from a set of possible messages; it did not refer to the meaning of the message, i.e. its semantic content.

Despite Shannon's warning that the application of his ideas was not 'a trivial matter of translating his words to a new domain' (Shannon 1956), economists argue that the cumulative effect of the flow of messages in an information flux is to reduce uncertainty, where uncertainty is now defined as, '… the difference between the amount of information required to perform the task and the amount of information already possessed by the organization' (Galbraith quoted in Daft and Lengel 1986: 556). In other words, for an economist, the effect of an information flux is to add, in a cumulative fashion, to the sum of what is already known.