This, then, was roughly where information sat when Claude Shannon picked up the thread. What began in the nineteenth century as an awareness that we might speak to one another more accurately at a distance if we could somehow quantify our messages had—almost—ripened into a new science. Each step was a step into higher abstraction. Information was the electric flow through a wire. Information was a number of characters sent by a telegraph. Information was choice among symbols. At each iteration, the concrete was falling away.
