In 1948 the engineer Claude Shannon published 'A Mathematical Theory of Communication', which defined information as a measurable quantity in bits and set limits on how it could be encoded and transmitted over noisy channels. This gave a rigorous foundation for digital encoding and underlay the later development of computing, telecommunications and data storage. From the late twentieth century, theorists such as Manuel Castells described the resulting 'network society' organised around information flows. The shift moved economic and social activity progressively onto digital infrastructures.
It provided the theoretical basis for computing, telecommunications and the internet, reorganising economies, work and social life around the movement and processing of information.