Shannon didn't study information. He studied information transfer. Information, that is what information is, is nothing but "philosophy". Yet without a common understanding of what the "information" is that we are talking about discussions run in circles.
That's a darn good point. Perhaps the creationist side is guilty of this too -- don't know, I spend more time reading evolutionist arguments -- but the evo side of this seems to obscure this fact in everything I'v read on this topic. Bits don't "mean" squat in and of themselves. It's dependent completely on the decoder, right? Because information has only been transferred once it's been decoded? Do you know of any study of the application of information theory to genome evolution that does not obscure this at all?