We might regard patterning or predictability as the very essence and raison d'être of communication - communication is the creation of redundancy or patterning.
If information is pattern, then noninformation should be the absence of pattern, that is, randomness.
This pattern/randomness dialectic does not erase the material world; information in fact derives its efficacy from the material infrastructures it appears to obscure. This illusion of erasure should be the subject of inquiry, not a presupposition that inquiry takes for granted.
When I laid there beside you, could you feel me there? My arms were wrapped around you, and I was stroking your neck.
The compounding of signal with materiality suggests that new technologies will instantiate new models of signification. Information technologies do more than change modes of text production, storage, and dissemination. They fundamentally alter the relation of signified to signifier. Carrying the instabilities implicit in floating signifiers one step further, information technologies create what I will call flickering signifiers, characterized by their tendency toward unexpected metamorphoses, attenuations, and dispersions.
If information is pattern, then noninformation should be the absence of pattern, that is, randomness.
This pattern/randomness dialectic does not erase the material world; information in fact derives its efficacy from the material infrastructures it appears to obscure. This illusion of erasure should be the subject of inquiry, not a presupposition that inquiry takes for granted.
When I laid there beside you, could you feel me there? My arms were wrapped around you, and I was stroking your neck.
The compounding of signal with materiality suggests that new technologies will instantiate new models of signification. Information technologies do more than change modes of text production, storage, and dissemination. They fundamentally alter the relation of signified to signifier. Carrying the instabilities implicit in floating signifiers one step further, information technologies create what I will call flickering signifiers, characterized by their tendency toward unexpected metamorphoses, attenuations, and dispersions.
