Top Highlights

• It differs from more elementary feedbacks in what Bertrand Russell would call its “logical type.”
• It is the thesis of this book that society can only be understood through a study of the messages and the communication facilities which belong to it; and that in the future development of these messages and communication facilities, messages between man and machines, between machines and man, and between machine and machine, are destined to play a...
• In control and communication we are always fighting nature’s tendency to degrade the organized and to destroy the meaningful; the tendency, as Gibbs has shown us, for entropy to increase.
• world. Just as entropy is a measure of disorganization, the information carried by a set of messages is a measure of organization.
• That is, the more probable the message, the less information it gives. Cliches, for example, are less illuminating than great poems.