Technologically-mediated idioms of symbolic communication reflect, reflexively shape, and functionally reproduce our identities and cultures. It may be less obvious but an orientation towards certainty and regulatory control is grounded in, and validated by, a core dependence upon an effectively impossible and conspicuously absent experience of closure, certainty and control. Consequently, the pursuit of closure and certainty in communication systems paradoxically ensures their openness and indeterminacy, perpetuating a dynamic cycle of interpretation and reconfiguration that mirrors the perpetual flux and negotiation of human identity and culture.
Culture is in this sense an instance of identity writ large, no less than identity is an adaptive microcosm and transient snapshot of the cultural time and place it occurs in. A most curious feature of a “successful”, sustainably self-propagating gestalt of human being(s) is that the closure, control, knowledge and reflexively self-validating systems of communication are not at all built for or around truth and certainty. The purpose of a communications system, and of all who sail in it, tends by variously emergent motivations, incentives, experiences and dynamics to acquire all the characteristics of an unresolvable enigma.
Improbable explanatory closure becomes an elusive goal, constantly deferred in a landscape of shifting interpretations and meanings, where certainty is always just beyond reach, and the quest for understanding becomes an infinite journey through the maze of human experience.
Daedelus Kite 