Commenting on 'What good is information?', by Dougald Hine
I’ve came across this article by Dougald Hine on AEON Magazine (March 6). It’s about the (redundant) subject of over information, boredom and knowledge. I commented with what follows, focussing primarily onto what is information for semiotics.
Interesting read, though maybe not particularly original to people familiar with interpretative semiotics. This discipline has outlined the fundamentals of the ‘information - meaning’ issue already in the late 60s. Then, in mid 70s U. Eco wrote A Theory of Semiotics (pub. 1979), a rigid yet very comprehensive general theory in which the author specifies, in this regard, that ‘information represents the lower threshold for semiotics’; something that means nothing if someone - a human being - does not actualise it. Eco’s focus on this issue is due to the rise of Information Theory (Shannon, 1948), which helped define communication as a process a great deal (sender-channel-noise-receiver), but did not put much focus on meanings, which should be seen, as suggested by semiotics, as the ultimate goal of communication. But again, there’re no meanings if someone does not actualise them.
Interestingly, meaning translates into message for semiotics. In some respect, it’s possible to say that a lot of contemporary communication acts - those processes that we activate by clicking here and there, by sending stickers and pokes, ‘liking’ randomness around,… - don’t represent communication at all (communication as that happy condition called negotiation of meaning), but rather they represent a sort of idea of communicability, the potential that some meanings could be negotiated, an environment where the impression of meanings originates.
However, another great aspect of semiotics (and especially interpretative s.) is the responsibility left to human beings - us - in the act of actualisation of meanings. Meanings are the cooperative result of communication processes, and therefore the problem of ‘too much information’ bounces back, in some respect, as ‘the problem of the lack of willingness to actualise information’. I think this is a very intricate phenomena and if the quantity of information is definitely an impediment for the actualisation (we simply can’t actualise everything), there are several other elements in the equation that render this issue as more complicated than it might appear.
Just to mention one rather important fact, we shouldn’t forget that the media environments for connectivity which characterise our contemporaneity welcome aesthetic communication a great deal. This might sound bizarre, especially if the idea of aesthetics is misinterpreted with naive concepts such as ‘beauty’ or ‘art’. The aesthetic nature of media and mass media communication had been outlined in the 60s (by Eco again) and lately this communication function has just peaked. Very briefly, the aesthetic function traceable in communication acts is a condition of what is said that comes with ambiguity and self-focus. As an obvious result (that we all probably know), aesthetic is that condition for which we consider more how things are said, rather then what is being said.
Now, what I’m trying to say here (chopped by brutal simplification), is that the aesthetic layer that characterizes the ‘breaking news!’ business, YouTube, social network’s ‘viral’ videos, and all those sorts of things is something that, so to speak, doesn’t help actualising what is negotiated in the network - that is the actual meaning of a communication process - due to the fact that how these things are ‘negotiated’ already produces some effects; surprise, amusement, fear, and so forth. This is an emotional layer, which I reckon is really important, but that needs comprehension.
I suggest a very simple exercise. Next time you get surprised by something you read or watched in the network, try to understand what is being said. It’s really intriguing to realise the extent of repetition and banality of a lot of ‘things’ injected into the networks. For example, we all know the massive phenomena of cat videos. A business of billion of clicks, ‘likes’ and ‘shares’. Countless hours of recordings that, more or less, represent the same subject - cats and their owners - doing the same things - acting weirdly, looking funnily, jumping here and there. Isn’t this a monstrous pile of information that basically might be reduced to the same meaning? Maybe there isn’t too much information out there, but just leading topics and relative, endless and camouflaged versions of them.