Context: U.S. Military to Trawl Through 350 Billion Social Media Messages
Analysis of hundreds of hundreds of billions of social media posts to be used in a computational analysis for prediction of cultural or ideological turbulence and entropy. It requires humility to acknowledge that your own ostensibly unique personality, conceptual vocabulary and social self-expression might be little more than a contingent recombinatory node of meaning in a dancing landscape of shifting patterns, linguistic fields, meanings and concepts. That is precisely what appears to be the underlying fact inflating the plausibility of such a study – the shared field of information is the primary reality.
The next iteration and logical consequence is not limited to that of only identifying the sophisticated form and flow of the information systems and symmetries; it is a matter of forecasting and (literal) interdiction.