Why is language so generally, genuinely and in all but the most trivial, superficial of meaningless of instances quite catastrophically inadequate for the task of clear and unproblematic communication? What is it, that is, that shrouds our primary method and medium of personal (interior, cognitive) or interpersonal communication in ambiguity and doubt? Beyond the irreducible […]
Tag: communication
Words Fail
I find that words are too slow, too clumsy and for all their intrinsic and adaptive plasticity as flexible tokens of an indefinitely extensible logical system of extended cognition in language, they are quite unable to obtain sophistication sufficient to actually capture or accurately reflect the quicksilver of thought. There are concepts, mental images and […]
How Disinformation Works
The old Nietzschean idiom about the abyss staring back seems apt here – as we gaze into an abyss of political chaos, partisan insecurity, confusion and intractable information complexity. This is precisely what is being done in the US right now through externally (and internally) sourced disinformation. Notice that, agnostic of truth-value, distributed patterns of […]
A recent quick dip and paddle into one of the big social media platforms revealed what is probably quite starkly and bleedingly obvious to other observers: attempts (by pretty much anyone) to say anything that is not entirely trivial and inconsequential, regardless of perceived or actual bias or partisan agenda, creates an enormous flurry of […]
Information Wildfire
Viewed in gestalt from a holistic perspective, information systems are naturally predisposed to moving through the combinatorial possibility-spaces of entropy into dissonant states. The question is as to whether that dissonance represents a literal sociopolitical or interpersonal turbulence and concrete representation of lost and unrecoverable (i.e. adversarial, belligerently futile) information or energy-processing potential, OR, if […]
Disconnection
The more we all become digitally connected, the less we actually and sincerely connect. There is a vast (and possibly inevitable) vacuum of trust and faith in each other, in interpersonal or international bonding and in humanity. This lack of trust leads us all, for the most part, to seek to share and inhabit the […]
It endlessly mystifies me that humanity, in finding itself so much more Globally-connected from an information or communications and technological perspective, simultaneously finds itself so catastrophically fragmented, isolated and divided from itself. It was never that we could not obtain the Universal freedom, direction or common goal that might potentially have united us so much […]
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, […]
Context: Facebook staffers walk out saying Trump’s posts should be reined in It is interesting to reflect that, shameless Executive bloviation notwithstanding, information and communications technologies from (for instance) Lascaux through emojis have never really been about truth and falsity so much as they have been about naked self-replication of the encoded system they bear. […]
Context: Strong Yet Brittle: The Risks of Digital Authoritarianism There are quite probable logical and (by extension, mathematical and) distributed material or socioeconomic, not to mention strategic, senses in which a strict adherence to unwavering and inflexible closure and continuity must necessarily create the conditions of inevitable, eventual and/or accelerated structural disassembly or decline. A […]
Can we consider the instance and structural context of the study of language to itself be a rare or unique language? What is a language? Can any ordered bearer of information be a language? Is a language only that ordered pattern of information that is understood, known, comprehended, intelligible? Is material reality a language? Is […]
A contemporary proliferation of fools is not half as terrible as their common access to digital communications platforms through which they might channel, diffuse and disseminate their compound and stagnant simpleton’s craft of remedial unknowing. In waving these great banners of stupidity, they seek to bludgeon rationality, intelligence and civilisation itself into humble (and submissive) […]