A classic film on communication finds renewed meaning in the age of memes and emojis
From personal email and texts to Facebook, Twitter and the like, the last several decades have seen an unprecedented influx of new means of human-to-human communication. So it’s a testament to the work of the US mathematician and ‘father of information theory’ Claude Shannon (1916-2001) that his model of communication, laid out in his landmark book The Mathematical Theory of Communication (1949), is still so broadly applicable.
Working from Shannon’s book, in 1953 the iconic husband-and-wife design team Ray and Charles Eames created the short film A Communications Primer for IBM, intending to ‘interpret and present current ideas on communications theory to architects and planners in an understandable way, and encourage their use as tools in planning and design’. Released at the dawn of the personal computer age, the film’s exploration of symbols, signals and ‘noise’ remains thoroughly – almost stunningly – relevant when viewed some 64 years later.
©1953 Eames Office LLC. Used by permission of the Eames Office. All rights reserved.
Directors: Charles Eames, Ray Eames
Narrator: Charles Eames
Music: Elmer Bernstein

videoMedicine
Drinking wine from toxic cups was the 17th century’s own dubious ‘detox’ treatment
11 minutes

videoEngineering
How water-based clocks revolutionised the way we measure time
10 minutes

videoEcology and environmental sciences
Join endangered whooping cranes on their perilous migratory path over North America
6 minutes

videoEnvironmental history
In Kazakhstan, ‘atomic lakes’ still scar the landscape decades after Soviet nuclear tests
13 minutes

videoArchitecture
A 3D rendering of the Colosseum captures its architectural genius and symbolic power
17 minutes

videoLanguage and linguistics
Do button-pushing dogs have something new to say about language?
9 minutes

videoMaking
On the Norwegian coast, a tree is transformed into a boat the old-fashioned way
6 minutes

videoHistory of technology
Curious singles and tech sceptics – what ‘computer dating’ looked like in 1966
6 minutes

videoComputing and artificial intelligence
Why large language models are mysterious – even to their creators
8 minutes