ABSTRACT
'Today,' a leading telecommunications firm announces in an imposing full-page advertisement, information is the most valuable commodity in business. As information theory has come to be widely applied in our high tech economy, it has had a twofold impact upon our popular culture. First of all, once 'information' had been divorced from its conventional meaning, the word was up for grabs. Secondly, information theory worked. In its own field of application, it provided the electrical engineers with a powerful tool that contributed significantly to rapid innovation. Achievements of this astonishing order were bound to shift our understanding of information away from people (as sources or receivers) toward the exciting new techniques of communication. In our popular culture today, the discussion of computers and information is awash with commercially motivated exaggerations and the opportunistic mystifications of the computer science establishment.
