Technology and human communication may not appear to have much in common, but they do. And knowing what they share can improve all your communications, including your marketing.

The idea that technology and human communication share elements is the basis of information theory, and it’s grounded in Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver’s Mathematical Theory of Communication. Shannon and Weaver developed a model to explain how information moves across machines.

Many communication experts have found that this technological model represents human communication well. It has been applied to enhance understanding of personal and media communication.

According to the model, technology and human communication messages contain the same elements. These are:

• Information
• Redundancy
• Noise

Technology And Human Communication
Share Information

According to the Mathematical Theory of Communication, information is a measure of our freedom of choice in selecting a message to transmit. You can read more about information selection at

How To Improve The Communication Process With Market Segmentation

Information, as this theory defines it, isn’t about meaning. So it provides a different way of considering how people as well as machines process information. It first establishes that in all communication there is a sender and a receiver. A signal transfers a code – words, dots, numbers, etc. – across a medium. The medium can be wires, waves, paper, etc.

The receiver gets and decodes the coded message. How true that information is to the original one transferred determines the faithfulness of the communication.

Technology and human communication use the same process to transfer information from the sender to the receiver.

Technology And Human Communication
Use Redundancy

The trick when coding information is to choose symbols so that the message will be decoded as it was coded. I’m not a computer techie, but I’m told that all computer information is coded with the numbers one and zero. That code makes sense to computers so they can communicate with one another. But I couldn’t read that code without computer software translating it for me.

The same is true for human language. Many modern languages use symbols that we call the alphabet, but the Chinese language uses entirely different symbols. I can’t read Chinese because I don’t know the symbols.

Thinking of information this way also provides a different perspective on redundancy. I normally think of redundancy as repetition. If something is important and I repeat that something multiple times in a message, I’m more likely to transmit that information to my receiver.

However, in technology and human communication, redundancy relates to the part of a message determined by rules governing the use of symbols. So again Shannon and Weaver weren’t considering meaning in, but the structure of information.

Technology And Human Communication
Have Noise

Technology and human communication have noise. Noise is anything added to the signal that is not intended to be there.

Consider this technology example. When you’re watching television and you get “snow” that’s something that’s not a part of the original message. It’s noise added somewhere along the transfer medium that detracts from the message.

In human communication, noise also comes from the transfer medium. For instance, if you and I are talking when a jet flies by, the noise of that jet interferes with me hearing the sounds that you just coded into your message.

Noise can be offset through increased redundancy for both technology and human communication.

Technology And Human Communication
Conclusion

This post provides just an overview of Shannon and Weaver’s theory. It’s covered in most communication books, including those on mass media theory.

My point here is not to cover the theory in detail, but to help you to understand the commonality between technology and human communication. If you’re a blogger or have an online business, you use both kinds of communication so knowing what they have in common can help you to become a better communicator.

And because so much of marketing involves communication, you’ll also become a better marketer.

Technology is used online to implement viral marketing. You can read more about it at the link below:

5 Disadvantages Of Viral Marketing 1-2

If you have trouble keeping up with technology demands, you’ll want to  check out Internet Marketing Technologies Demystified.

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Posted 3-6-09:
What Technology And
Human Communication Share

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