ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the historical development of information theory and traces its intellectual impact on the academic field of communication. It focuses on how communication scholars used Claude E. Shannon's information theory. The chapter argues that the concept of information, while central to communication research has been poorly constructed by communication scholars. It suggests directions for improving our understanding of the information/communication relationship. One of the most important turning points in the historical development of communication theory and research occurred when Claude Shannon proposed the concept of information in his two 1948 articles, which were republished in a book with Warren Weaver, A Mathematical Theory of Communication. Shannon's one-way model of the communication act helped set off the academic field of communication theory and research. This model, with certain modifications, provided a single, understandable specification of the main components in the communication act: source, message, channel, and receiver.
