What would Shannon's Law look like today?

Went to the RSA session at lunch time today, Nico McDonald interviewed James Gleick about his latest book "Information". I haven't read it yet by the way, but was curious to see if he would add anything new to a subject much trawled over with a book the NYT reviewed as:

“The Information” is so ambitious, illuminating and sexily theoretical that it will amount to aspirational reading for many of those who have the mettle to tackle it. Don’t make the mistake of reading it quickly. Imagine luxuriating on a Wi-Fi-equipped desert island with Mr. Gleick’s book, a search engine and no distractions. “The Information” is to the nature, history and significance of data what the beach is to sand.

Anyway, a few grains from the talk - I got more from his answers to the questions than anything else:

Firstly, where is the value in Information?

- Attention and my data is what is valuable not just data

- Have we forgotten about value of editing? The new world will have a big place for guides

- Comms in telegraph era gave the shadow of the future, ie knowing things elsewhere in advance matters - there will be similar emergences with the current information systems

- Navigation in books is taken for granted but took some time to fathom, navigation of digital media (search, Social media) is in its infancy

Secondly, the risk of untramelled commercial interest:

- Who does the screen on front of you on the aeroplane belong to - you or the advertiser (ie there will be increasing invasion of "our" information spaces.

- We need institutions in society that promote trusted objectivity desperately, as the internet is increasingly awash with (well resourced) self interested parties, dubious facts and downright falsehoods and currently awards the noisiest or most popular rather than the correct. ( My Comment - too much information leads to Newtons law of facts, ie for every fact on the InterWebz there is an equal and opposite fact )

Also, there was a rather interesting discussion over whether all this information is leading to a rise in order or disorder - entropy or enthalpy. No real conclusion, but it did bring me round to thinking about Claude Shannon. Gleick kicked off with Shannon (as any decent book on information should) and Shannon's "Noisy CHannel Coding Theorem" - which essentially establishes that "for any given degree of noise contamination of a communication channel, it is possible to communicate discrete data (digital information) nearly error-free up to a computable maximum rate through the channel." (Wikipedia - but it leaves out the "so long as the system has redundancy" rider ). In otherw ords, given a particular channel, Shannon allows you to predict how much true information can you get reliably, and what has to change to increase this.

Given the continual reversion to the issues of all forms "noise" in modern digital channels, I'd bet that today Shannon would be looking at how to filter search and social media data flows.