“An information system is an organisation of people, materials and machines that serves to facilitate the transfer of information from one person to another. Its function is social: to aid human communication. If we take this to mean all reception of signals by the human senses (sight, sound, small, touch, taste,…)- then communication is an incessant and essential accompaniment of all human activity. If we restrict the meaning of signals to flowing between people, much of the daily life of most of us is occupied by such interpersonal acts.”

— Brian Campbell Vickery

Source: Information Systems (1973), p. 1.

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Brian Campbell Vickery 84

British information theorist 1918–2009

Brian Campbell Vickery (1918–2009) British information theorist

Source: Information Science in Theory and Practice (1987), p. 1; As cited in: Lyn Robinson and David Bawden (2011).

“The theory of communication is partly concerned with the measurement of information content of signals, as their essential property in the establishment of communication links. But the information content of signals is not to be regarded as a commodity; it is more a property or potential of the signals, and as a concept it is closely related to the idea of selection, or discrimination. This mathematical theory first arose in telegraphy and telephony, being developed for the purpose of measuring the information content of telecommunication signals. It concerned only the signals themselves as transmitted along wires, or broadcast through the aether, and is quite abstracted from all questions of "meaning." Nor does it concern the importance, the value, or truth to any particular person. As a theory, it lies at the syntactic level of sign theory and is abstracted from the semantic and pragmatic levels. We shall argue … that, though the theory does not directly involve biological elements, it is nevertheless quite basic to the study of human communication -- basic but insufficient.”

Colin Cherry (1914–1979) British scientist

Source: On Human Communication (1957), What Is It That We Communicate?, p. 10

“Systems transfer or transform materials, energy or information - and usually all three. An information system is one whose prime function is to transfer or transform information: the telephone system is an obvious example. This book concentrates on certain types of information system: those concerned with the transfer of information between specialists, mainly with reference to their work, and mainly based on documents. The focus is thus on specialised documentary information systems.”

Brian Campbell Vickery (1918–2009) British information theorist

Preface; First paragraph
Information Systems (1973)

“In order to correctly define art, it is necessary, first of all, to cease to consider it as a means to pleasure and consider it as one of the conditions of human life. …Reflecting on it in this way, we cannot fail to observe that art is one of the means of affective communication between people.”

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer

What is Art? (1897)

“The most likely reason for the adoption of a relatively small number of discrete intervals as the tonal material for music is that discretization or categorization is a typical, if not universal, strategy used by animals in order to reduce information overload and facilitate processing when subjected to the high-information-conetent signals and/or high information rates from a highly developed sensory system (e. g., Estes, 1972; Terhardt, 1991). An obvious example is the processing of speech information by humans, wherein each language selects a relatively small portion of the available timbral-differences that can be produced by the vocal tract as information-carrying units (phonemes) in the language. A related reason for discrete scales, and another obvious analogy with speech perception, lies in the social aspect of music. Music first developed as, and still largely remains, a social phenomenon associated with religious or other rituals that, like language, necessitated an easily remembered common framework.”

Edward Burns (1968) American actor and director

Burns, Edward M. (1999). "Intervals, Scales, and Tuning", 'The Psychology of Music second edition, p. 218. Deutsch, Diana, ed. San Diego: Academic Press. ISBN 0122135644

“The concept of communication includes all of those processes by which people influence one another… This definition is based on the premise that all actions and events have communicative aspects, as soon as they are perceived by a human being; it implies, furthermore, that such perception changes the information which an individual processes and therefor influences him.”

Gregory Bateson (1904–1980) English anthropologist, social scientist, linguist, visual anthropologist, semiotician and cyberneticist

Source: Communication: The Social Matrix of Psychiatry, 1951, p. 6 as cited in: Stewart L. Tubbs, Robert M. Carter (1978) Shared Experiences in Human Communication. p. 1

“The meaning of life for human beings is to serve one another for the survival of humanity and the advancement of civilization.”

Newton Lee American computer scientist

ACM Computers in Entertainment (Volume 3, Issue 1, January 2005)

“The biosphere is now enriched with an other stratum, mid-way between the material and the spiritual, and that is the web of connections, a “virtual” reality made of communication by means of the new media. On a daily basis, we move around in this space with all the content we are capable of. This physically concretizes the concept that all humans can merge in a single moment, where no one is separated from the others and all become a single entity, which is the web.”

Caterina Davinio (1957) Italian writer

Source: Virtual Mercury House. Planetary & Interplanetary Events, p. 44

“Human cognition constitutes a natural information processing system that has evolved to mimic the architecture of biological evolution… Both evolution by natural selection and human cognition can be characterised by a series of basic principles. In the case of human cognition, these are:
The information store principle dealing with human long-term memory;
The borrowing and reorganising principle dealing with how we characteristically obtain information from other people;
The randomness as genesis principle dealing with how we create novel information;
The narrow limits of change principle dealing with the role of a limited working memory in processing novel information;
The environmental linking and organising principle that explains how we use organised information held in long-term memory to determine how we interact with our environment.”

John Sweller (1946) educational psychologist

John Sweller, "Evolutionary bases of human cognitive architecture: implications for computing education." Proceedings of the fourth international workshop on computing education research. ACM, 2008.

“Physically, we transmit signals or signs -- audible, visual, tactual. But the mere transmission and reception of a physical signal does not constitute communication. A sign, if it is perceived by the recipient, has the potential for selecting responses in him. Physically, when we communicate, we make noises with our mouths, or gesticulate, or exhibit some token or icon, and these physical signals set up a response behavior.”

Colin Cherry (1914–1979) British scientist

Source: On Human Communication (1957), What Is It That We Communicate?, p. 10

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