Categories
communication

The Gossip Game

Much of the analytical (academic) discourse regarding social system self-propagation gets swept up and away by the effective subset of communication and information propagation that it, itself, represents. The point: human social systems not only exhibit but constitutively are the distributed mnemonics and information artefacts they produce. Academic and institutional contexts derive value (and relevance) […]

Categories
culture

How Pop Culture Works

A (personal) theory on the persistence of popular cultural flotsam: • Culture as an autonomously self-propagating information-processing system has evolved to encode (i.e. store) itself in multiple, parallel ways – for redundancy and continuity. • The value of such superficially-itinerant, largely vacuous, trashy culture is in the various ways that it stores partial, incomplete images […]