Categories
communication

Censorship is a Broken Gambit

As an observer of media and communications systems in regards to oversight, constraint and psychological, cultural or ideological aspirations to control and manipulate, there is a curious enigma and blind-spot in all attempts to surveillance as a method of control. That is, specifically, that asserting prohibition and censorship is only ever superficially able to provide […]

Categories
communication

Engaging Deep Fakes: When Truth is not Truth

Information, like entropy, is always created. When considered in gestalt: successful cultural, technological or socioeconomic systems (and their diverse artefacts or entities) are autonomously-oriented towards self-propagation as biological as much as material facts of information and energy-processing. One of the common errors we make when we engage the growing presence of both amateur and professionally-bespoke […]

Categories
communication

Change is as easy as A, B, C

As it ever has been with this human being: finding an order, a pattern a convention or conceptual trope we tend on the whole – and with very little convincing required to overcome what minimal (and liminal) barriers to our gullibility that might exist – to mistake the order we find as being meaningful, objective, […]

Categories
communication

Using Social Media for Statistical Analysis and Prediction?

The extent to which we are all merely self-propagating soliton-like saliences in a rippling probabilistic field of information and energy remains largely unexplored but fertile for investigation.

Categories
art communication culture

Curatorship: Creativity is not Bounded by the Borders of an Artefact

Observe: the creative node in a cultural network – the artefact, the object, the concept – is never the terminal boundary of the artist’s endeavour. The contour and flow of living information systems in minds and cultures are dynamic and adaptive; the life and boundless complexity of an artefact is that cascading field of consequence […]

Categories
communication

The Consolation of Etymology: Pugilistic Spell-Checkers

I am engaged in an unrelenting death-match of Greco-Roman wrestling with mobile device spell checkers. I have had some very near-misses on social media. The spell checker on my phone recently tried to insert Gestapo instead of gestalt and circumcision instead of circumlocution; needless to say – this would have dramatically re-framed the intended meaning […]

Categories
communication Complexity culture

Language is an Operating System

Language is something of an operating system. Language also represents a self-propagating, abstract information system – much like culture or socioeconomic reality – that inhabits us just as much as we inhabit it. Human beings, technologies, artefacts and communication systems are the medium through which this linguistic entity manifests and self-replicates. The resilience of this […]

Categories
communication

The Persistence of False Belief

Do we possess beliefs or do beliefs possess us? Are the distributed, integrated information artefacts and systems of belief actually entities in their own right? Are individual nodes in a networked, self-propagating information system really the storage components for the resilient continuity of an idea, a belief or an ideology? Are the intrinsic errors (within […]

Categories
communication Complexity culture

Disassembling Control: Talent, Technology and Entropy

In any context where an employment and technology ecosystem is so rapidly evolving – recognising talents, skills and aptitude becomes about as difficult and as (ultimately and) unmanageably complex as acquiring or maintaining them. What interests me here is a second-order semantic analysis: there is such an efflorescence of salient wisdom and clever advice available, […]

Categories
communication culture technology

Rethinking Social Media

I came across an interesting idea today: the production of a new, reliable, verifiable, safe and trustworthy social media platform. My reflex was to think: what of the tendency of information and energy-processing (i.e. communications) systems to autonomously drift into optimally-concise patterns and methods of self-propagation? There is no particular brilliance about Facebook et. al. […]

Categories
communication Complexity culture technology

Technology: Utopian Aspirations?

Utopian aspirations are inevitably three parts marketing and one part plausibility. While communication (as much as communications platforms or technologies) is necessarily a matter of endlessly effervescent linguistic or logical self-inflection, the implicit openness of our contemporary context and the cognitive hyper-extension of technological complexity represents cost and burden as much as it does utility. […]

Categories
communication culture technology

Engaging Fake News: Information Security, Journalism and Artificial Intelligence

Here is some interesting content on the topic of identifying fake news and media content Verifying online information: The absolute essentials. Related to this – AI is rapidly becoming proficient at generating compelling, targeted falsehoods and dissimulating sources across diverse media artefacts, channels and contexts.  In information security there is a turn towards entirely automated […]