Meaning may be "irrelevant" to C. E. Shannon's "Mathematical Theory of Communication", but context is not: the transmission of a message begins with an "information source" and arrives at a "destination." The distance between these two contexts, the source and the destination, creates the possibility of interference in the transmission by "noise", whose position provides a third context. With these three contexts, however, meaning reenters communication: the meanings of the locations of the source, the noise, and the destination. As always, what is claimed to be irrelevant in a system haunts it: here, in the formulation of information theory, the situated nature of meaning undermines the initial attempt to disregard it. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 9 February 2026)