SNF Dialogues: Between signal and meaning

As part of a four-talk series, distinguished speakers from past SNF Dialogues discussions are taking the stage at SNF Nostos to share their expertise, thoughts, and experiences. 

There is something quietly vertiginous about reading emails from the dead. They sit there, perfectly ordinary, a click away from the never-ending present, with a voice so present it takes a moment to remember that it isn't.

Claude Shannon gave us a theory of information so precise and elegant it built the modern world. Neil Postman spent his career insisting it had missed the point entirely. Between those two positions — signal and meaning, fidelity and truth — lies something worth examining: why, as our capacity to communicate has grown beyond anything previously imaginable, do we seem to understand each other less?

Every technology that promised to bring us closer—the letter, the telegram, the telephone, the cassette, the email—quietly changed not just how we spoke, but what we were able to say. The medium, as someone once remarked, is the message. And the message, increasingly, is noise.

We have arrived at a peculiar moment: an age of perfect transmission and profound incoherence. Social media has not merely polluted the epistemic commons — it has rewired the conditions under which shared truth becomes possible at all. And on the horizon, artificial intelligence represents the final, exquisite perfection of Shannon's dream: transmission without loss, infinite fidelity, and no more meaning than there ever was.

Alex Krasodomski-Jones spoke at the SNF Dialogues discussion "Social Media and Social Change" in January 2020 and authored the SNF Dialogues opinion piece "Social Media Movements: Patience, Participation, and Attention" in August 2022.