This Is What We Know So Far
A report on words, sounds and images
“It is probably dangerous to use this theory of information in fields for which it was not designed, but I think the danger will not keep people from using it.”
Guilty! To the aforementioned words, written by American psychologist and computer scientist J.C.R. Licklider in 1950, we plead guilty to using “this theory of information” to explore how we help people, businesses and organizations communicate to their audiences. Yet before you pass sentence, permit us to make our case — if not for innocence then at least for leniency.
This theory of information that Dr. Licklider speaks of is the brainchild of Claude Shannon. Claude Shannon? Never heard of him, you say? Shannon’s thoughts and observations are as vital to our understanding of communications as the thoughts and observations of Einstein are to our understanding of quantum mechanics, or those of Galileo to making sense of our solar system.
Many academics have indeed compared Shannon to Einstein. Some others have thought the comparison unfair — to Shannon! Einstein’s findings — while revolutionary in his field — have little if anything to do with our everyday lives. Shannon’s findings, meanwhile, have everything to do with how we live today. Our whole wired and wireless world is his legacy.
So what exactly is the big deal?
In an article, published in two installments in the Bell System Technical Journal (the first in July 1948, the second in October of that year), Shannon presented what Scientific American later called the Magna Carta of the information age. In “A Mathematical Theory of Communications”, Shannon declared that all communications systems — from a conversation between two people across a kitchen table to a financial transaction made across the continent to a satellite signal beamed around the world — could be and should be thought of in the same way: as ways of moving information from one place to another.
As a corollary to this declaration, he stated that messages transmitted via communications systems all followed the same basic pattern:
Which brings us to that innocent-looking box in the middle of the diagram: noise source. Shannon contended that all messages, as they traveled from source to destination, faced the problem of noise: “The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point.” According to Jon Gertner, in The Idea Factory, his history of Bell Labs, “Noise interfered with the accurate delivery of the message, and every channel that carried a message was, to some extent, a noisy channel.”
So what did Shannon propose? He said and proved that methods exist to make sure messages arrive where they are supposed to — clearly and reliably.
Again, here is Gertner to explain: “Shannon showed that any digital message could be sent with virtual perfection, even along the noisiest wire, as long as you included error-correcting codes — essentially extra bits of information — with the original message. Error-correcting codes were meant to ensure that the information on the receiving end was exactly or very close to the message that left the transmission end.”
The momentousness of Shannon’s general rules and unifying ideas of information cannot be underestimated. All modern communications engineering — wired and wireless — is based upon the insights he laid out in his article. Information theorist Toby Berger made the case more satisfyingly: Shannon had founded a field, stated all its major results and proved most of them all pretty much at once.
Top communicators convey information that’s meaningful.
Shannon believed the semantic aspects of communication were irrelevant to the engineering problem. According to him, one shouldn’t think of information in terms of meaning but in terms of its ability to resolve uncertainty.
Professional communicators believe differently. We write sentences, tell stories and draw pictures to persuade others to think or act or feel in certain ways. We communicate to convey meaning. To us, meaning isn’t semantics; meaning is everything.
While Shannon did not think our desire to convey meaning was a fundamental problem of communications, we communicators can use his understanding of messages and the noise they encounter to better appreciate how to convey meaning most effectively to our audiences. Just as engineers must take steps to make sure messages get where they were supposed to clearly and reliably, so too, in our own way, do professional communicators.
So what is noise and what is error correction to communicators?
Words, sounds, images. These are the three basic channels of virtually all communications. The information we communicate from one place to another can be made up of words or sounds or images only. A radio play, for instance, conveys meaning strictly via sounds — voices, music and sound effects.
Yet most often, what we communicate combines at least two of these channels. A film is a combination of sounds and images. A newspaper is a combination of words and images. So is a tweet, not merely if an image file is attached, but also when we consider the characteristic design of this medium. A speaker delivering a presentation using PowerPoint is a combination of words, sounds and images. In fact, the meaning of information is more likely to be understood by audiences when communicators use all three channels seamlessly.
As communicators, we must minimize or even eliminate the noise in our carefully chosen channels to ensure what we express — and the meaning our message conveys — is received faithfully and understood clearly by our audiences. The idea of noise in communications is presented best in this brief passage by English polymath Herbert Spencer: “The more time and attention it takes to receive and understand each sentence, the less vividly will that idea be conceived.”
Viewed from Spencer’s astute perspective, noise is anything that causes an audience to fail to absorb immediately the true meaning of what they are reading, hearing or seeing. To put the case in more striking terms, noise is anything that distracts, tires, confuses or conceals unintentionally.
Noise is anything that distracts, tires, confuses or conceals unintentionally.
Communicators distract, tire, confuse or conceal unintentionally in many ways — when they present unnecessary nuance; when they merely inform rather than also inspire or entertain; when their style is unsuitable to the genre or medium in which they are communicating; and most often, when they break or do not follow commonly understood rules and conventions of use.
This last one is the starkest and most common fault of communicators. The sentences we write, sounds we utter and images we draw are governed by conventions of use. The meaning that communicators send via words, sounds and images often fails to reach intended audiences — who either lose focus or interest, or spend too much time and effort trying to absorb meaning — when communicators do not understand or violate outright rules and conventions of use.
Error correction to communicators, then, is practicing methods that reduce the likelihood that their audiences will fail to absorb immediately the true meaning of what they are reading, hearing and seeing. Let’s look at this idea and practice of error correction in words, sounds and images.
How we write what you read.
Writers must follow rules of grammar, punctuation, spelling, syntax, diction and logic to communicate information that convinces people to act in certain ways, think specific thoughts and feel precise emotions. When writers adhere to the rules, they reduce the likelihood that their writing conceals, distracts, bores or confuses. They reduce the noise.
To ensure that audiences can absorb immediately the true meaning of what they are reading, communicators also follow proven methods for specific genres of writing. Writing for the web, for instance, is far different than writing in any other medium. People don’t even read most text when they view web screens; they scan screens, searching for the specific information they need or, failing that, looking for an opportunity to link to another page that will take them closer to the information they seek. As a result of the way readers use web text, communicators follow the most current standards for web usability when they write text for the web.
Top communicators use methods for nearly all genres of writing. These methods ensure that taglines, advertising, annual reports, web writing, branding exercises, communications via social media, and company and product naming convey intended meaning, without forcing communicators to dumb-down, simplify or trim back the ultimate message or the creativity they use to communicate that message. While communicators must avoid verbosity and unnecessary nuance, brevity and simplicity on their own are no solution to reduce or eliminate noise. An ill-conceived product name or company tagline can introduce boredom or confusion among an audience, while the meaning of a 10,000-word article or report, if properly crafted, can be conveyed clearly to its intended audiences.
Brevity and simplicity on their own are no solution to reduce or eliminate noise.
By ensuring the technical proficiency of writing, these methods make it possible for creativity to flower fully; and the more creative a message is the more likely it is to influence an audience’s thinking, emotions and behavior. This point is vital and therefore bears a deeper explanation. Following conventions, rules and methods does not automatically make what you write uncreative. Top communicators understand that conventions, rules and methods enable them to minimize or even eliminate noise from the messages and meaning they want to convey. High creativity is another tool to reduce noise to a minimum. For instance, a story — perfectly relevant, vividly told and inhabited by compelling characters — can bring an abstraction to life and better enable an audience to think, feel or act in a specific way. Again, rules don’t hinder creativity. In the right hands, rules make it possible for creativity to flower fully.
Finally, yet most importantly, communicators must appreciate that character, not fact, is the foundation of all persuasive writing. When an audience seeks the counsel of others to guide its decision, that audience looks not for facts but for the telltale qualities of intelligence, conviction, humility and empathy. When the balance of these four qualities strikes an audience as appropriate to the subject, to the medium and to the audience’s situation, that audience allows itself to trust and be persuaded.
Top communicators rely on specific techniques, employ precise rhetorical devices and ensure key markers are evident to ensure that the four qualities of character (intelligence, conviction, humility and empathy) are present to the right degree and in the appropriate balance in any message they produce. This must be the serious duty of any writer who wishes to communicate to influence the thinking, emotions and behavior of any audience.
How we write what you hear.
Communicators transmit meaning via sounds in many ways. Music is the most popular and ubiquitous form. (A story to be told by someone with intimate knowledge of that medium of expression.) Alarms use clearly defined and identifiable rhythms and volumes to convey precise meanings. The steady, tinny ring of a manually wound alarm clock is much different than the pulsing, electronic blare of a building’s fire alarm. Like alarms, most ring tones are also specific to devices. Rotary phones, mobile devices and Skype, for instance, can each be identified by a distinctive sound pitch and pattern.
Radio programs were once a dominant form of communication in which meaning was expressed wholly through sound. “Sorry, Wrong Number” is a near-perfect illustration of how voices, music and sound effects can be used to communicate meaning immediately and clearly. Some advertisements on radio were equally powerful at conveying meaning through words and music, and thereby swaying preference among consumers. The 1926 jingle for Wheaties established the General Mills breakfast cereal as a national brand. Creators of this jingle realized that their message had to be conveyed in a manner appropriate to the medium. What better way to communicate via sound than through song?
Some radio ad men understood the need to create specific messages for the medium of sound. What is most startling is how few did. A surprising number of commercial spots in radio’s golden age were merely announcers reading copy out loud. No distinctive voices, no compelling stories, no inventive sound effects. How boring — and, therefore, how noisy!
By the time most ad men fully grasped how to reduce the noise of boredom, confusion, distraction and concealment from radio ads, television had supplanted radio as the Western world’s dominant information medium. As a result, the success of radio advertisements to communicate meaning via sound pales in comparison to that of television ads and jingles. We can all think of favorite TV spots whose sounds gripped the public’s imagination and therefore whose meanings continue to resonate with us clearly and vividly to this day. “Plop, plop, fizz, fizz”, anyone?
Which leaves a final method of communication via sound — speeches. Speeches are the quintessential aural medium of persuasion. Of course, people use private conversations all the time every day to communicate meaning to others. Some people, however, make more formal addresses to audiences that range in size from small groups of people to millions watching via television. In these cases, the spoken word has the power to alter lives of individuals, nations and even the world.
Speeches are not lectures; they are not essays read aloud; they are not meant to merely inform audiences. A speech-maker’s singular objective is to persuade an audience to think or act in a certain way.
Yet writing for the ear is different than writing for the eye. Speechwriters can reduce the likelihood their words conceal, distract, bore or confuse in two main ways: first, by ensuring the four qualities of character (intelligence, conviction, humility and empathy) are present to the right degree and in the appropriate balance in any speech they write; and second, by mastering the use of rhetorical devices.
Rhetoric on its own is often called the art of persuasion. It is useful to think of rhetoric as a writer’s deliberate manipulation of logic (argument) and syntax (order of words) to produce reliable effects on audiences. This manipulation is carried out through repeatable patterns of either thought or sentence construction in techniques known as rhetorical devices. Several hundred of these devices have been observed, named and practiced since Aristotle and his disciples began identifying them some 2,500 years ago, yet knowledge and use of some 150 is all that is required to master how to write for people to truly hear.
The basic premise of rhetoric is that an argument that feels intelligent, mature and wise will be thought so, and that making an argument feel that way often has more to do with structure than meaning. Rhetorical devices are tricks of structure. They work because our desire to know the truth has led over time to agreement about which qualities of argument indicate truthfulness. Rhetorical devices mimic these qualities and in doing so enable speechwriters to reduce and even eliminate the noise of concealment, distraction, boredom or confusion.
How we draw what you see.
The notion of noise in writing (anything that causes an audience to fail to absorb immediately the true meaning of what they are reading) applies equally to design. In design, just as in text, that meaning is what the communicator — in this case, the designer — wants his or her audience to think, feel or do.
As writers do with words and sentences, designers adhere to a series of principles to ensure what they create communicates the meaning they intend with a minimum of noise. The three main principles are clarity, candor and coherence:
Clarity: Designers must establish exactly what they wish to communicate to their intended audiences and use only those visual elements that fulfill that established purpose. For instance, designers use a large image or text header to emphasize that certain content is important, draw a thin line to outline a block of text in a box, and make space around specific content to give it room to be seen and taken in by viewers.
Superfluous visual elements are those that don’t fulfill the established purpose of a communication. These elements often include (but are not limited to) flashing icons, multicolored backgrounds, low contrast between content and background, and poor color choice, such as red on blue.
Candor: Designers use images and text to communicate with audiences, so they must express established meaning in as open and honest a manner as possible. Top designers create for their users’ experience and not their own. They make sure meaning reaches users with a minimum of noise by employing design layouts and interfaces that are either intuitive or that users understand easily. They don’t try something radically unconventional unless it corresponds with the meaning they wish to communicate.
Coherence: Designers organize visual content according to a hierarchy, placing emphasis on the most important visual elements. They can create visual hierarchy for viewers through the use of contrast and the scale of elements.
The following three designs show these principles at play.
Clarity: This image combines four separate shapes: three letters from our alphabet and a heart. These shapes are a simple cipher that audiences must decode to understand the meaning being communicated: I love New York. Graphic designer Milton Glaser created this image as the visual centerpiece of an advertising campaign to promote tourism in the State of New York.
Candor: Communicating is all about codes and ciphers. Think about it: Our English alphabet is a series of 26 shapes that each represent a sound. When written, these shapes convey information from senders to recipients. The simplicity of the “I love New York” cipher means that it can be decoded and its meaning appreciated almost instantaneously by nearly anyone who understands English. The only noise associated with this image is that many people outside of English-speaking countries will not know the code with which to decipher the meaning of this message.
Coherence: Each of the four aspects of this image is given equal weight and therefore meaning. The combination of these four images within the image makes for a structurally coherent and pleasing whole. The image is almost perfectly harmonious. The enduring power of this image’s structure is manifest in how often and in how many different ways this image has been imitated, parodied and even copied.
Clarity: To highlight the lax laws and weak regulations related to guns in the United States, this print ad is a clear combination of two main elements: an unsettling and slightly absurd image, and a short question. It features two schoolchildren standing side-by-side and staring blankly into our eyes. One is holding a Kinder chocolate egg, the other an assault rifle. The text above their heads reads, “One child is holding something that’s been banned in America to protect them. Guess which one.” Moms Demand Action For Gun Sense in America devised the ad in the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.
Candor: The ad conveys its meaning openly by highlighting the absurdity of what has been banned in the United States to protect children — a chocolate egg with toys inside and not an assault weapon similar to the one used recently to murder many schoolchildren. The arresting nature of the image spurs you to read the words. Even alone, the image poses a clearly rhetorical question and thereby conveys a straightforward meaning: How could any reasonable person consider a chocolate egg to be more dangerous than an assault rifle?
Coherence: The content of this ad has been designed to emphasize its most important visual element: the two children. They are centered in the shot, with bright lighting on their faces used to highlight them even more. A visual hierarchy has also been created for viewers through the use of contrast: the background of the image is blurred and darkened slightly to reduce its importance. This blurring and darkening is intentional noise that is meant to deter viewers from trying to clarify its contents. The use of a limited amount of text also helps emphasize its importance.
Clarity: This webpage is designed to communicate one message clearly: Tile is a product that helps you keep track of the things you can’t afford to lose.
Candor: Presented using infinite scrolling, this webpage uses images almost entirely to reach its audience. These images show plainly how consumers can integrate the product into their lives. A call-to-action button is placed at the end of the “image narrative” to enable viewers to take action to purchase the product.
Coherence: The webpage has little noise. It relies on large yet simple images to divide content, strong use of white space to help separate elements from one another and an explicit visual hierarchy to emphasize where viewers should look next.
This is what we know so far.
These thoughts on information theory and how we write, speak and draw are unfinished. Shannon’s insights give us a way to structure and express our thinking about communicating through words and images. Yet we appreciate that we will never have a complete understanding of the path down which we travel. Even Shannon himself, years ago, cautioned us to tread carefully:
“Our fellow scientists in many different fields, attracted by the fanfare and by the new avenues opened to scientific analysis, are using these ideas in their own problems. Although this wave of popularity is certainly pleasant and exciting for those of us working in the field, it carries at the same time an element of danger.”
While we accept his admonition, we nonetheless press on and, perhaps, through consistent application of our proven practices, continued study and reflection, and an open spirit that embraces and seeks to understand new ideas on communicating and new methods to communicate, we will come to a truer knowledge and greater mastery of words, sounds and images. This is what we know so far.
