Information encoding for message transmission is a function expressed in (and as) visual culture and which evolves over time. What we experience as style, technique, idiom and medium (of information or message transmission) are all in fact optimally concise methods of communication in the context in which they occur. What is more interesting than this fact of optimally concise communication is that of the exponentiated recursive function by which the method of optimal information encoding is itself optimally encoded in the artefacts of material culture, the extended environment and culture within which information is transmitted and in the minds of the participant observers of that culture. A logic of communication is stored in material artefacts and its expression and distributed embodiment in culture evolves over time.
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Encoding Culture
A logic of communication is stored in material artefacts and its expression and distributed embodiment in culture evolves over time.
Daedelus Kite 
2 replies on “Encoding Culture”
In your assertion, “A logic of communication is stored in material artifacts “, are you saying that the means of understanding the communication is stored within the medium or elsewhere?
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Hi. The logic is a distributed pattern and self-propagating abstraction of information. Information systems are constantly processing and optimising the paths and routes or methods of storage and systemic self-representation. Meaning is just another word for optimally-concise representation so yes, the means of understanding are probably stored in the material culture, also in and as technologies of communication.
There is a continuum between inner and outer – the individuated, isolated self and meaning-maker is always already only really just recombining and reshuffling those externally-acquired concepts and entities. Reflexive mutual causation – subjectivity and volition may be problematic under analysis; the means of understanding are stored as a continuous presence of the same logic which incurs them and which inflates the recombinatory conceptual contents of the meaning-makers.
Can culture “think”, perhaps not – but as a distributed information-processing system undergoing endless extension, it features a variety of the key elements of autonomous mental activity. This all really leads to a necessity for rewriting our notions of subjectivity and self.
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