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let's say that the meaning of information comes from the content mediated by rules as to use, which you can think about as following from the social status assigned it.
assigned seems too anthropomorphic.
the social status it acquires.
acquires because one way of thinking about concepts is that they are little theories.
these theories we develop as we swim through our various environments and information is an environment.
information in this case is material that refers to a world beyond your immediate experience and which positions you in a particular kind of relation to that world in the process.
but the relation to information is not the same as the way in which information positions you through your interaction with it.
that positioning is a result of a processing or reading-off of features, an organization, an act.
this processing presupposes rules. these rules are condensed into the concept, which then is not exactly the word "information" in this case, but something more like the word "information" embedded in particular patterns of reception and activation, if you know what i mean. you recieve information--it arrives--you activate it--you unzip it, and enter into the sets of relations which are structured in or through it. so information about a "riot" in a parisian "banlieu" is both a collection of factoids that order and "refer to" a sequence of signifieds (the images you see as you read or listen) that substitute for the referent (the events)---what a "riot" refers to, the singular status of the term as over against the multiplicities that it groups or orders.
these processes seem to be shaped by more general assumptions or rules.
if information is a commodity, maybe one set of relations shapes the performance of the actions of reception/activation.
if information is a public good, maybe a slightly different set of relations.
that feels overly formal.
what do you think?
do these assumptions that seem to operate at a high level of generality (information as commodity, information as public good) shape how you imagine interpretation would work? not so much at the level of content, but at the level of relation to what is interpreted? in other words, do you think that information-as-commodity and information-as-public good result in basically different types of relations to information and by extension to the world?
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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