Probably one of the dozen or so most important publications of the twentieth century. Ironically though it would be Norbert Wiener's interpretation of information (exactly Shannon's times minus one) that would cement itself in the popular lexicon due to it being far more intuitive. Where Wiener posits information as negative-entropy (or "order"), Shannon interprets it as representing a degree of freedom, or uncertainty. The problem with Wiener's is that the underlying epistemology carries a subjective bent, where information is equivocal to "meaning" or semantic content. Shannon's, meanwhile is ultimately superior as an objective metric, though far less intuitive (under his interpretation, a random string is technically the most information-saturated construct possible, because it possesses the highest degrees of freedom).