The linguistic sign, according to Saussure, is pure form, arbitrary in its essence. Through language, the shapeless cloud of thought becomes coded into this form, creating an order of intelligible signs, thus conveying meaning.
An analogy can be made with the flow of information, although already coded into language, becoming intelligible through the interfaces we use to organise it. An interface, like the linguistic sign, suggests form onto which data is coded. It's structure shapes the way we make sense of a given set of information.