How Did Claude Shannon Turn Information Into Bits?

David Senra, reading the book's account, says Claude Shannon turned information into bits by treating it as a measurable quantity. Before Shannon, information was a telegram, a photograph, a paragraph, or a song, and there was little sense of it as an idea fitted for hard science, just as objects had inertia before Newton. After Shannon, information was entirely abstracted into bits. Information theory was his recognition that all information, whatever the source, the sender, the recipient, or the meaning, could be efficiently represented by a sequence of bits. He treated the bit as information's fundamental unit.

Senra thinks the paper was published in 1948. He says it introduced ideas behind the modern digital world and is widely regarded as one of the most influential scientific papers of the 20th century. It laid a theoretical foundation for the internet, data compression, error correcting codes, digital telecommunications, modern computing, and much of today's AI infrastructure.