In the spring of 2005 I had been giving a series of lectures on a few of the various communication theories. The lectures focused on the theories as they applied to design. Because my audience was mostly made up of Interactive Media students, I was able to present material and ideas from such diverse areas of study as Semiotics, Media History, and Cybernetics without alienating them. In fact, I was truly impressed with the paradigm shifts that the students were able to follow with seemingly little effort… so impressed, that it began to bother me.

I can clearly remember that some twenty years ago, my peers and I desperately struggled to understand these very same concepts, often without any clear success. Of course, back then the VCR, the CD player, and the Video game represented the highest achievements in personal media access and any reference of signal to noise ratio was just a technical way of saying that your television reception was fuzzy. Coincidentally, it was while lecturing on Shannon and Weaver's Mathematical Theory of Communication and going off on a little side tangent about the VCR, that I was able to grasp why a group of students born a generation after mine, could so easily understand what might as well have been Quantum Mechanics to us.

For those that could use a little background on The Mathematical Theory of Communication I have included the following illustration:

Originally, this diagram was used to explain the way that telephone cables and radio waves transmitted information, but it was later applied to nearly all forms of communication.

Although there are a number of elements presented in the diagram, the two that I focused on in the lecture were the line of communication from the information source to the destination , and the input of noise from some other source.

For a quick example of how this theory might apply to design, consider the article that you are reading right now. As the author, I am the information source and as the reader, you are the destination . If we were to stick with the strict technical application of Shannon and Weaver's theory we would then fill in the rest of the diagram with the server that hosts this Web site as the transmitter and your computer as the receiver , but since we are focusing on design, the Web page that I have created is the transmitter and the Web page as you see it, is the receiver . This leaves us with the element of noise to be defined.

Again, a more technical look at the theory would define the noise as any additional data that somehow leaked into the stream and interfered with the clarity of the original signal. (This would be the static that makes the image on a television appear fuzzy.)

In design, it is often difficult to pinpoint the noise because it can be in the form of an intentional addition on the part of the designer. The safest rule for identifying noise in design is to look for anything that is not the signal or content…. regardless of the designer's intent.

In the example of this Web page, the words and characters that make up this article are the signal, but while the reader is concentrating on the content, the other elements of the Web page become the noise. (I.e., table lines, the background, the navigation, etc.) These elements that have nothing to do with the content can interfere with communication by distracting the viewer from the article or, in the case of a hyperlink, actually lead them away from the signal.

During the lecture, one of the students asked for a practical example of the theory applied to a visual media; one where the noise had been inserted as a part of the signal. At the time, using my own Web site did not occur to me. Instead, I told a story about the first time that I had rented a movie to watch on a VCR.

The movie that I chose was Apocalypse Now! I had not seen it when it had been released to the theaters, but I had heard plenty of great things about it. I knew that it was a movie that I wanted to see.

While watching the film, I stayed glued to my seat with my eyes fixed on the tiny television set… I was completely wrapped up in the story. Near the end, as the narrative approached the climax, there was a scene where the camera panned slowly across several books. I knew that the director must have thought the books important to the story, but the television screen was so small that I could not make out the titles. I stopped the movie and rewound it. Several times I replayed the scene, each time placing my face closer to the screen. Finally, I was able to discern one of the titles: The Golden Bough .

For the rest of the movie I was distracted by the appearance of the book. (and by stopping to rewind the movie several times.) I had never read the book and I had no idea what Frazer's The Golden Bough had to do with the story?

In this case the signal had become noise… so much noise, in fact, that I found my mind wandering from the action on the screen. I have no doubt that my experience was completely tainted by the noise of the book's title and I was even more confused by the movie's end.

As I was relating this tale, I thought about what had happened after I had seen the movie and it occurred to me why the students attending the lectures could so easily grasp concepts that had been elusive to students a couple of decades ago. After seeing the movie, I had been so impacted by the noise of the book that I went to the library and checked out The Golden Bough . After I had read it, I rented the movie a second time. The second time I watched it, the noise of the book title became the most important part of the signal. Not only did what I had read in The Golden Bough fill in the missing gaps of the story, but the gained understanding elevated the movie to what I thought was the best piece of cinema that I had ever seen. In other words, I had learned the code of the noise and it was no longer noise because I understood it.

Twenty years ago, so much of what we were told about post-modernism, post-structuralism, and semiotics was clouded by an off-balanced signal to noise ratio caused by a lack of experience and clear example. Since we did not understand the signal, it came across as noise. Today those same ideas are as much a part of our culture as the ideas of Freud. (I am certain that Freud's work was just as esoteric to the students of his age as Derrida was to the students of my generation.) Today's college students have been immersed all of their lives in a media that has embraced deconstruction, cybernetics, and the Mathematical Theory of Communication. When we were children, we watched Gilligan's Island ; they watched shows like Max Headroom . They may never have read Shannon and Weaver, but they could not have turned on the television or plugged in a video game without being exposed to their ideas … ideas that over the last few decades have permeated and influenced every media.

So the next time a car passes with its stereo blaring some style of music that you think is nothing but noise, keep in mind that it might be because you do not understand the code.

One man's noise is another man's signal.

(* author's note: In a typical article such as this, an author might go into details about the plot of Apocalypse Now! and provide specifics on the subject of The Golden Bough. I will do no such thing. In the first place, I do not think that adding “spoilers” to this article will make my point any more clear. In the second place, if the reader has seen the movie and read the book they will have already filled in the details and finally, in the third place, if the reader of this article has not seen the movie or read the book, I do not want to ruin their chances of having the same experience that I did.)