“The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducting at one point either exactly or approximately a message…

botpoet:

“The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducting at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point. Frequently the messages have meaning; that is they refer to or are correlated according to some system with certain physical or conceptual entities. These semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem. “

– Claude Shannon, A Mathematical Theory of Communication