This quantification of information can mean many things, and when examined in a societal sense should and must include the nuances, specificities, vagaries and other assorted formations in order to capture and reduce, “information” - the foundation with which we form meaning. In other words information serves as the symbolic substance by which systems of meaning are formed within society. Meaning, which we, as human beings, as animals, as members of society, as members of an in group, out group, citizenry etc base our individual and individuating actions on. These actions constitute evidence of agency.
Information theory understands all codes as operating within statistical constraints that make the succession of symbols more or less likely (which allows the maximization of information transmission through a channel). Another key implication, however, is that all events (from the occurrence of a symbol within a code to all communication acts) can be described as a selection among a set of mutually excluding and more or less probable alternatives. The communication of information thus implies the reduction of material processes to a closed system defined by the relation between the actual selection (the real) and the field of probabilities that it defines (the statistically probable). The relation between the real and the probable, however, also evokes the spectre of the improbable, the fluctuation and hence the virtual. As such, a cultural politics of information somehow resists the confinement of social change to a closed set of mutually excluding and predetermined alternatives; and deploys an active engagement with the transformative potential of the virtual (that which is beyond measure)
Shannon writes the above in his paper “A Mathematical Theory of Communication”. He establishes an implicatory relationship between the undefined.
The transmission of information engages the technical as means; language, phonetics, symbols, signs etc. All yield with them a nuanced flavour the above mentioned statistical probabilities scatter around the actual selection (the real).
In the case of networked society the prevalence and disregard with which symbols and signs are formed to abstract the “real world” has an excellent propinquity quality – the attraction of default. The default value with which those new to enter, are socially included and may never reach an awareness of having joined.
Of course, the concept that there is a real world is in fact rather dated in this light: “The simulacrum is true...” (Ecclesiastes in Baudrillard) perhaps alluded to the post-modern melding of representation and reality as the “third order” of simulacra. Reality in this light is the coming together of the probabilistic determination of plural meaning – a unitary real/reality reality.
In the techno-social simulacra of the post-modern world, filled with social cues interpreted, abstracted, distributed and enacted by highly technological means which implicate distribution, the essence within which the real, hidden now, more and more abstracted by a realer simulation; at least a perception becomes that of simulacrum.
The continued cyborgisation of this techno-social milieu is part of an accelerant default to the “quantification” of information and the apparent quantification of ontology in a mechanistic sense, one made out of statistical probabilities. The quantification implies the binary form of on and off states and with it a dimension in which the elements of the essential Being are reduced to a succession of symbols, itself a reduction based on participation. A succession which washes over the majority thinly, distributing quanta of the essential in a rhizomic orgy of networked “existence”.
Bibliography
1.Tiziana Terranova, Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age (Pluto Press, 2004)
2.M Taylor, “Rhizomic folds of interstanding,” Tekhnema, no. 2 (1995): 24-36.
3.Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and simulation (University of Michigan Press, 1994).
4.Claude E Shannon, Warren Weaver, and Shannon, The Mathematical Theory of Communication (University of Illinois Press, 1998).
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