iMessage, World War 2, and A Mathematical Theory of Communication

When you text a friend, what do you mean and I don't mean literally what words are you trying to say? I mean, what emotion are you trying to send? In most interactions we send messages, but what we are really trying to send. It's a feeling that I've been thinking about this concept a lot recently, specifically because this weird culture war of blue bubbles versus green bubbles or ios versus Android messages has been a lot louder this year than usual, I mean, this conversation has been happening . basically since

imessage

first launched in 2011, but this year in particular it seems like there are a lot more articles being written and a lot more trending tweet threads, but there was one article in particular that made me stop and think that I should probably look at this one. a little deeper why apple message is winning, teens fear the green text bubble, there was a lot of your standard stuff in there like how group messages suck if you have at least one android user in your thread and how you react to something on the iPhone. you end up with a page of reactions on the Android phone, but there was one statistic in particular that really made me understand how important text bubble color has become to people if you're 18-24 and live in the United States.

Joined. claims there is now a 75% chance of owning an iPhone, up from 45% just five years ago, a 30% increase in mobile operating system share in just five years in probably the most valuable market for most of these companies, that's huge, so I started paying closer. attention and I noticed that every time I switch from an iPhone to an Android phone I start getting messages like this and every time I switch back to an iPhone I get messages like this and for a long time I found this to be the case. strange phenomenon, such a visceral reaction to the color of my bubble, I mean, blue is not an intrinsically more valuable color than green, it's just a color, but even I have to admit that when I'm on an iPhone and a green message appears , I get this weird little feeling of frustration and I don't like it, I feel bad because people are so much more than the color of a bubble, so my original intention for this video was to delve into why what is the underlying catalyst that makes you gives such an instinctive reaction to those green bubbles that it makes you feel an inherent sense of frustration when a bubble comes in that is a different color than what you expected at a higher level, there are some pretty obvious answers to this, mainly that the message is a rich

communication

service which means it sends information over the internet which gives you access to things like online reactions and responses and typing indicators and better group conversations and when you text to an Android phone it switches back to SMS which It is an older, more archaic standard with fewer features. but I wanted to dig a little deeper: what is it about our human need for

communication

that makes us feel physically uncomfortable when we receive a color we weren't expecting and that causes my iPhone friends to send me messages like that when I switch back? to an Android phone that makes a single app give an operating system a 30% market share in five years.

What is it about our need for human interaction that makes all of this so frustrating for everyone involved, so I've been researching this for a couple? of months and what began as a look at the effect of a single color on our psyche led to a

world

war, a new

mathematical

theory

of communication, and why I think perhaps computers were never made for us in the first place. In the early 1940s, the

world

was in the middle of a conflict and, although it didn't seem like it, it was a war of encryption of information, secret messages.

World War II was fought with foot soldiers, but it was actually a battle of military intelligence. game that was driven by which side had superior intelligence in those early periods the US government went from university to university looking for the best minds in what at the time was considered electrical engineering, they needed to find people who knew how to keep safe top secret information. as well as people who knew how to reveal that top secret information and it was in these early periods that they stumbled upon a man named Cloud Shannon, so I was researching this guy and it was pretty clear that he was going to be a good candidate.

He has a degree in mathematics and engineering. He has a master's degree and a PhD from MIT. He was already big business in the field at the time, but people who know about him seem to consider him the father of the information age. The reason we have smartphones and the Internet are right up there with Newton or Einstein in terms of importance, but the strange thing is that I've never heard of him. I went to computer science school and never heard of it once. I asked my other engineering friends if they had never heard of it.

This guy seems to be an enigma, so when the government recruited him, Shannon had just published his master's thesis, a symbolic analysis of relays and switching circuits that proved Boolean algebra. Using a one meaning true or a zero meaning false could be used to simplify virtually all telecommunications relays and those relays could also be used to solve Boolean algebra problems. Shannon had effectively invented the modern digital circuit, the component that runs most of our modern systems. world and he did it at the age of 22, but the government originally recruited him to work on anti-aircraft missile systems and fire control systems, things that they needed in the immediate present and not on these radical ideas for the future, but Shannon She was clearly interested in pushing her information ideas forward, so while she was doing the heavy lifting the government needed her to do, she was also quietly developing her next thesis Now with that first paper, Shannon had effectively created the logic board, a series of and zeros that, when put together, could create much more complex systems and solve several different types of problems, but building the logic board only solves about half of the problem.

Shannon's first paper described all the ways the circuit itself could be simplified, but what happens to the information passing through it if it doesn't? If you don't think about the efficiency of the information that actually travels through that system, you're still going to be left with an inefficient system which is like designing the most efficient highways but without thinking about the efficiency of automobiles, so in 1948 Shannon published a new article that had been quietly working on over the course of the war an article that would change the way we communicate that would lay the foundation for the entire information age a

mathematical

theory

of communication there are many ideas in this 45 page article, But at the core are some basic concepts that all these other ideas are packaged in addition to the fundamentals that help define how we send information through virtually any channel and perhaps the reason why this blue bubble versus a green bubble even exists in the world.

First of all, let's analyze it. This schema describes how information is transferred through any system. It works with voice, light or sound. Anything that transfers information from one place to another. As Shannon put it in her article, this flowchart is a function of time and other variables. That's what are supposed to be the fundamental pillars of how we move information through any channel during any period of time. I know this all may seem a little complicated, but trust me, I'm bad at math and this turns out to be it. It's actually pretty simple to understand, I mean, they're supposed to be the building blocks of how we send information.

Now this video is supposed to be about text messages and we'll get back to that, I promise, so let's use a text message as an example. Well, first you have the source of information, the beginning of this information system, in this case that source of information is me. I have something I'm trying to communicate to you, an idea I'm trying to send but what to do. that I'm going to need a transmitter for that information now we're talking about text messages, generally we're talking about words on a screen, things that you can read on your phone that communicate an idea, so in this case that transmitter will be my fingers. and the phone itself, those inputs go through my fingers and into the device and then that device can transmit that information over a channel.

Now, in this case, that channel is the wireless network. My text must be sent over the airwaves to a cell tower and then routed to you, but the problem with almost any channel is that it is not perfect. In almost any channel, from communication to chemistry to physics, there will always be potential for entropy and noise, randomness and interference that is totally out of your control If you have ever received a text message that had some parts of the message backwards or maybe just missing, that would be this. There's a chance that the channel you're sending the information over simply doesn't get to the other side exactly as you sent it, but then it gets to the receiver, which is what picks up the information you're sending over the channel, so in this case is your phone, the device receives the information on the other end and displays it on your screen and finally you have got the destination and in this case it is you, finally you are receiving the information that I published in the world and the system is complete now .

I know it may seem like this flowchart is pretty specific to telecommunications, but it works with virtually any form. of information transfer from screams to smoke signals, we can use something even more basic, let's say you are having a conversation with your friend, you have the source of information, which is you, you have the transmitter, which is your vocal cords. You have the channel which is the vibrations in the air, you have the entropy and the noise, maybe in this case there is literally a car passing by or maybe your throat hurts a little bit and you can't articulate properly, then you have the receiver, which is your friend's ears and finally you have the destination, which is your friend's channel.

This system, along with some of the other foundations in this document, constitutes information theory, the very basis of how we send information through space. Works with foot messengers and smoke signals. and texting and the Internet, virtually any method of information transfer can be boiled down to the fundamentals in this document, and the nice thing about boiling something as basic as information transfer down to its foundations is that you can trace it back to its roots and then branch out. From there you can optimize that system, so how do you make the most efficient car travel on the most efficient highway?

Now we have to remember that in the 1930s and 1940s information was expensive, it wasn't expensive like today or you could just write paragraphs after paragraphs of text or lines and lines of code and back then it didn't really matter, every bit mattered and especially during a period of war, the time it took to encode a message, send it through the channel, and decode a message. It could literally be the difference between life and death, so the messages had to be short, they had to be transferred quickly, and they had to be exact, hey, what's up?

John told me to tell you that there might be a missile coming towards you, we think that might be the case. could come from the west, can you imagine if someone had to encode that sending over a channel and decode it into something like morse code? I mean, that would be a pretty big problem. Instead, it would probably be a lot easier to say something like missile west, I mean, it's still a shorthand way of saying something that's a lot longer, there's so much information encoded in those three letters and it's a lot easier to send a telegraph, like that.

If the information is expensive and urgent, how do we optimize the information? that is sent through that channel, there are a couple of different ways, first is the information density, think about sos again, so much information is sent through those three letters and Shannon even challenged mathematical models that can give different weights to different letters and words that allow you to create sentences with the highest possible information density to transfer an idea, different words and letters encode different amounts of information, so if you can optimize the information density, you can optimize the information that is sent through the channel and that's something called channel capacity and channel capacity specifically defined by Shannon. as the highest rate of information that can travel through a given channel with arbitrarily low error rates because information needs to travel quickly but it also needs to travel accurately, you have to take into account that entropy and the noise within that channel,I mean, you don't want your enemy to encode your message, you have to keep in mind that these optimization ideas eventually became the basis of much of the future.

I mean, a lot of computing is just trying to figure out the optimal way to code something in the future. The cleanest and most efficient way possible and you may not even realize it, but many of the systems we use today are based on these optimization ideas. I mean, think about when you had your T9 flip phone and you only had a certain number of characters. that you could send via text and then you only had a certain number of texts you could send per month. I mean, I'm constantly trying to optimize my tweets by changing words and using shorthand to fit those 280 characters when the channel sending information is limited, you have to work very hard to send those ideas as efficiently as possible.

The original Super Mario Bros fits in 32 kilobytes of storage. There's a famous story where Pokémon Gold and Silver were going to be much smaller games, but someone came along and optimized them so well that they were able to add Kanto back in along with Jodo, especially in the early days of computing efficiency, but here's the most important and maybe the reason texting sucks so much. As a form of communication, humans are not efficient beings at all, we write books of thousands of pages, we make three and four hour movies, we tell long and winding stories and it is really rare for any of these things to be concise.

It is not necessary that they are not code intended to be executed. Your emotions must be shared. I mean, think about this if I text you. Hey, do you want to grab a coffee at the coffee shop later? Maybe around six, there's something literal. information encoded there, i.e. time and place, but what am I really telling you? Coffee is clearly not the important thing here, maybe we had a fight and I'm reaching out to try to repair that relationship or maybe I have some interesting news that I want to share with you in person. Words are literal Boolean concepts, they are things that were created by humans to communicate an idea, but it is the emotion associated with those words that is completely dictated by context.

In a relationship, you could send the exact same text message to 10 different people and the emotion communicated with those words would be completely different, but is emotion mathematical? I mean, Shannon's theory defines how we send information through a channel, but does it define how we communicate? We are not concise and efficient as we have to be in war, we are verbose, artistic and complex and it is this idea that made me think that maybe Shannon's article was mistitled mathematical theory of communication information theory, that is, communication involves information is a central part, but human communication is not just information, it is information plus emotion, so with that in Mind you, perhaps Shannon's paper should have been called mathematical information theory.

If you want to define how we really communicate, you have to add that. emotional element again into a constant entropic variable that is different literally for every relationship a constant that turns information theory into communication theory an actual mathematical theory of communication, so I guess that brings me back to the point of this video, what does the green bubble have? It makes people so uncomfortable, it makes my friends so distressed when I switch to an Android phone and they are so happy when I switch back after going down this rabbit hole for the last few months.

I think the answer is this, even if it wasn't incredibly obvious. In the 1930s and 1940s, information theory and the papers that defined it would be some of the most important bodies of work of the 20th century, laying the foundation for almost all of computing and, perhaps more importantly, the way that we share information. and humanity's shared existence now takes place in both a digital and physical sense, but those theories are fundamentally binary, they are ideas based on Boolean algebra, they simplify more complex ideas into ones and zeros, truths and falsehoods, yes. and no, and while they defined the most efficient way to send information through a channel, they did not define how we actually communicate, so everything that was born from those ideas was also based on efficiency through a channel and not in our interpersonal relationships in most communications that The emotional element becomes much more obvious and more established the more we use our other methods of communication.

Think about your body language. The expressions on your face. The intonation of your voice. We have so many ways to communicate that emotional element. The ability of the channel to transmit information in one way. The text may be loud, but what about the channel's capacity for emotion? What about the communication element that really encapsulates what we are trying to say in a text? Words are only half the story. It's the context. The emotional element that really communicates what we want to say. But

imessage

is a rich communication service that works over the Internet, which means its users have access to things like reactions and typing indicators, high-quality image and video support, and memoji in rich group conversations.

These are all things that amplify emotional efficiency in that channel. While you don't get the same benefits as human-to-human interaction, a rich communication service simply has a much greater emotional efficiency than SMS, it is a much better method of communication, meaning reactions say much more than the words you say. They are found above a heart reaction could say I hear you, it could say I love you or it could simply be a way of saying you saw a message. Writing indicators can help indicate presence. They can give that feeling that you are there with the person you are with.

Have a constant conversation and not just a series of delayed broadcasts. Online replies allow you to have multiple conversations at once. Support for high-quality images and videos can help you share your world with a person and even something like Memoji can help add a custom facial expression that helps increase the emotional efficiency of your message. These rich communication features are like an extension. of your vocabulary, they are not literal like text, but they help you fill out the emotional element that you normally get when having a face-to-face conversation. Face talk, I mean would a memoji ever be used during a war, what gif?

These are inherently information inefficient, but they are emotionally efficient and help us communicate, but the problem is that Apple Message is one of the only rich messaging protocols that is not. Platform independent, that means if you're messaging another iPhone user, you're using iMessage, but as soon as you message an Android phone, you'll revert back to texting to this older, less-featured standard, So if you are an imessage user and look at that green bubble that is a signal to your brain that you are about to significantly reduce your emotional capacity. You cannot use online responses. Your group conversations are going to suck.

You cannot use reactions or memojis, nor have high-quality images or videos. and all of these things add up to these frustrations of not being fully heard. I know it may not seem like a big deal if a text is reverted to SMS, but imagine what it would feel like to have half your vocabulary taken away from you. Imagine that you are capable. use all the language with some friends but only half with others and over time these frustrations become inextricably linked to the color of your bubble and then we end up here with 75 percent of young people in the US owning an iPhone because It allows them to communicate how they really feel.

If you're wondering why people care so much about the color of your bubble, this is probably why, and this doesn't mean I absolutely agree that it has to be that way. As you may recall from the top of this video, part of the reason this conversation has gotten so loud this year is because Google has been pushing Apple to support RCS, a rich, open communications standard that Apple could add. easily to your messages app if you wanted to. rcs would allow iPhone and Android users to share this valuable communication. They could do things like have online responses and reactions and rich group conversations and support for high-quality images and videos. rcs wouldn't include everything that's been added to imessage over the years, but it would help put an end to the classism that was born from the color of a single bubble but of course it's more complicated than that.

There are many valid reasons why Google wants Apple to add support for rcs and some valid reasons why Apple probably doesn't want to. Like almost everything in life has a lot of nuances to it and for my day job I actually helped make an explainer video that goes into a lot of depth on this topic so I guess I'll leave a link or something in the description if you want see him. but you know, it's pretty funny, while I was in the process of writing this video, something pretty interesting happened. If you've ever used an Android phone, you probably know that when an iPhone user reacts to one of your SMS messages, they'll send a completely separate message describing the reaction, it might say something like this user loved this message or this user emphasized This message if you haven't seen it before looks like this This became quite frustrating because you could quickly end up with a whole message page of these reaction descriptors, but the problem was that the Android phone couldn't just not notify you that the iPhone user had sent that reaction because then there's an emotional disconnect and you're basically making the best of a terrible situation that Google recently tried to solve. fix the issue manually to help increase emotional efficiency between an iPhone and an Android phone, I would stamp a little reaction emoji in the corner of your message instead of sending you a full text separately.

Cool at first, it seems cool, I mean, it's frustrating that you can't return a reaction, but it's better than getting pages and pages of these reaction descriptors written, but sometimes when you try to solve a problem you end up with more problems and that That's definitely what happened here. I mean, a couple of these translations are nice. However precise you can make them, they are direct conversions of iPhone reactions to an emoji stamped on Android text, but some of them are less so, so the haha ​​reaction translates to a laughing and crying emoji, the question mark translates into a thinking emoji.

As much as Google has tried, these emojis just don't have exactly the same emotional context as the reactions sent from the iPhone and perhaps the worst of all of these is the heart reaction that translates to the heart eyes on the Android phones. I know this may not seem like a big deal, but it's actually a big deal. I mean, imagine you're on an iPhone and you're chatting with your Android friend, you ask them how they are and they tell you okay, my dog ​​died. the other day, but we're working on it in this context, a heart emoji might be appropriate because it can imply that you're there for them, but then the Android user gets a heart eyes emoji and I mean that's nothing appropriate, there is a The receiver receives a completely different emotion than the one sent from the source of information.

To be fair to Google, not all message reactions have emojis that can be directly translated. There is no emoji haha ​​right now but there is a heart emoji so I probably should have used that now, the crazy thing about all this is that there are so many other rich communication services out there and they are all cross platform, you have things like Facebook Messenger, Telegram and WhatsApp, and in practically any country outside the United States. claims that these rich communication services are the default, I mean, WhatsApp alone has over 2 billion installations worldwide, which is more than a quarter of the planet, but for some reason in the United States we are obsessed with the use of the default apps on our phones and the default messaging app. on the iPhone there is the messages app and by extension imessage, so I guess this is where we are until Apple adds support for rcs, which I don't see happening anytime soon, we will be left with this emotional disconnect, this culture war between the bubble blue and the green bubble, this culture that suddenly promotes that 75 metric to go up more and more because at the end of the day, phones have to do with communication and the operating system that has the best emotional efficiency, the application that has the best theory of communication, that is the operating system that goes forwin in the end thanks for watching I guess I'll see you next time I have something to say see you