Encoding

To that extent, codes represent a broad interpretative framework used by both

addressers and their addressees to encode and decode the messages. Self-
evidently, the most effective communications will result when both creator and
interpreter use exactly the same code.

Only when the message is encoded in a Signal for transmission through a

medium-for example, when ink is printed on paper or when electrical pulses are
sent racing along telegraph wiresdoes it assume material form. The very
definition of "information," then, encodes the distinction between materiality and
information that was also becoming important in molecular biology during this
period.

Information theory treats the communication situation as a system in which a

sender encodes a message and sends it as a signal through a channel. At the
other end is a receiver, who decodes the Signal and reconstitutes the message.
"The computer encodes the message in binary digits and sends a signal
corresponding to these digits to the server, which then reconstitutes the
message in a form the students can read."

(Manovich) Traditionally, texts encoded human knowledge and memory,

instructed, inspired, convinced and seduced their readers to adopt new ideas,
new ways of interpreting the world, new ideologies.

Information]
Information is always lost or disguised in the process of encoding, never
generated.

Encoding 1
 The significance of a coded transmission never exceeds that of the message it
encodes.

(Manovich) In contrast to an analog representation, a digitally encoded

representation contains a fixed amount of information.
[...]
analog media where each successive copy loses quality, digitally encoded media
can be copied endlessly without degradation.

Shannon: 14 The ratio of the entropy of a source to the maximum value it could
have while still restricted to the same symbols will be called its relative entropy.
This is the maximum compression possible when we encode into the same
alphabet. One minus the relative entropy is the redundancy. The redundancy of
ordinary English, not considering statistical structure over greater distances than
about eight letters, is roughly 50%. This means that when we write English half of
what we write is determined by the structure of the language and half is chosen
freely.
Shannon: 42 . . . no matter how we encode the binary digits to obtain the signal,
or how we decode the received signal to recover the message, the discrete rate
for the binary digits does not exceed the channel capacity we have defined.

(Ernst) Thus materialist media archaeology is overlain by a logical level in the

information age, when such tapes still recorded physical signals but the signals
were encoded as information (bits)—techno-logy in its strictest sense.
(Ernst) It is true that the amplitude modulation of analog radio is already sheer
encoding, and speech and music can be heard only when they are demodulated—
that is, decoded. Digital transmission works the same way, but this encoding is of
a different epistemological and practical nature. What is today entering into the
medium of radio is this kind of operational mathematics: computing.

Encoding 2
 Galloway) regulations always operate at the level of coding—they encode
packets of information so they may be transported; they code documents so
they may be effectively parsed; they code communication so local devices may
effectively communicate with foreign devices.

Natural encoding]
By the late 1970s Guattari had explicitly widened the definition to include not
only ‘semiotic systems’ but also ‘social fluxes and material fluxes’ Guattari, 1984
288 The semiotic component of ‘natural encoding’ designates the work of codes
in material fluxes.
Guattari’s category of a-semiotic or ‘natural’ encoding takes issue with those who
would equate the genetic code with language . . . examples of natural encoding
include endocrine regulation, as well as the message-relaying functions of
hormones and endorphins 1977 263, 304 & 332 // 1984 97 98, 167 & 130
With natural encoding, no translation is possible from one code to another, or
from a natural code to a semiotics, because these codes are completely
territorialized, confined to a highly specific domain. Linguistic signs cannot
directly intervene in the biological, physical, or natural worlds. Jakobson, then,
was wrong to confuse biological encoding with language, according to this line of
argument Guattari, 1977 302 .
Unlike a human speaker or writer, the genetic code knows neither emitter nor
receiver. No one ever ‘wrote’ the genetic codes. No one receives the genetic
message Guattari, 1979 211 . These a-semiotic ‘natural’ chains of encoding do
not involve semiotics at all, but instead formalize the arena of material intensities.
This is why Guattari draws biological encodings outside of the semiotic matrix,
connecting form directly to matter.

(Manovich) In contrast to analog media which is continuous, digitally encoded

media is discrete.
(Manovich) we are no longer interfacing to a computer but to culture encoded in
digital form.

Encoding 3
 (Manovich) computer games and virtual worlds continue to encode, step by step,
the grammar of a kino-eye in software and in hardware . . . [t]his encoding is
consistent with the overall trajectory driving the computerization of culture since
the 1940's, that being the automation of all cultural operations. The side effect of
this automation is that once particular cultural codes are implemented in low-
level software and hardware, they are no longer seen as choices but as
unquestionable defaults.

(Manovich 125 6) computer operations encode existing cultural norms in their

design . . . what was a set of social and economic practices and conventions now
became encoded in the software itself.

Terranova): Unlike previous media such as print and writing, modern media, in
fact, do not use the code of a workaday language, but ‘make use of physical
processes which are faster than human perception and are only susceptible of
formulation in the code of modern mathematics’. We could refer to the
informatization of culture as starting with the analogue function of frequency,
that is with the encoding of sound in the grooves of a gramophone record, where
speech phonemes and musical intervals were recognized for the first time as
complex frequency mixtures open to further mathematical analysis and
manipulation.
Terranova): For Friedrich Kittler, it is also with telegraphy that information, in the
form of massless flows of electromagnetic waves, is abstracted for the first time.
In this sense, information is not simply the content of a message, or the main
form assumed by the commodity in late capitalist economies, but also another
name for the increasing visibility and importance of such ‘massless flows’ as they
become the environment within which contemporary culture unfolds.

[encode the signal to minimize loss]

Terranova): Communication engineers identified the noise in channels with the
discrete character of the electrons carrying the current. Amplification did not
correct the disturbance because messages or signals ended up swamped by their
Encoding 4
 own energy. The problem could not be solved simply by increasing or decreasing
the amount of energy flowing through a channel, but various types of filters
proved to be a partially effective solution. What was needed, however, was a
technique to encode the signal in such a way that it would minimize loss of
quality by some kind of error control instructions. Engineers thus needed a
function that would enable them to build systems that could distinguish noise
from signal and hence correct the corruption of messages. But in which ways is a
signal mathematically distinguishable from noise? This question required a
method for identifying information as an entity that could be separated from the
meaning that could be made of it.
Terranova): For Claude E. Shannon, messages ‘[f]requently … have meaning; that
is they refer to or are correlated according to some system with certain physical
or conceptual entities. These semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to
the engineering problem’.
Terranova): Shannon’s diagram identified five moments or components in the
communication process: an information source, a transmitter, the message, the
channel of communications and the receiver. It is a deceptively simple diagram.
The information source, or sender, selects a message to be coded into a signal
that is then transmitted through a channel to a receiver. Information is the content
of communication, in the sense that it is what needs to be transported with the
minimum loss of quality, from the sender to a receiver (as if in an older mode of
communication when the latter mainly referred to physical transport). At the same
time, this content is not defined by its meaning, but by a mathematical function –
a pattern of redundancy and frequency that allows a communication machine to
distinguish it from noise. As all information theorists will emphasize, although we
can attribute meanings to information, the latter does not coincide with its
meaning. An encoded television signal or a piece of software has no meaning in
the conventional sense.

Terranova): As all information theorists will emphasize, although we can attribute

meanings to information, the latter does not coincide with its meaning. An
encoded television signal or a piece of software has no meaning in the
conventional sense.

Encoding 5
 Examples

Hall (on encode)

Encoding 6