anyway

I haven't read the Hayles, so I'm posting about last week's readings.

At root the issue Wiener and Weaver are concerned with seems to be the same. The problematization of words like "culture," "communication," "language," "society" and "person" leads to a nebulous place where there is little distinction between terms. The incredible onrush of science has given us the ability, in a sense, to make the written word malleable like a thought. However, even as we increase our machines' ability to store complex information, we don't seem to be getting any nearer to the understanding of the process of language, in which a symbol apprehended within the intellect is translated to a communicable form. The problem is that by articulating an idea the majority of its significance is lost. Wiener and Weaver blame the function of entropy, of whose operation we understand very little beyond certain general laws. It is a problem of compression--a multiplicity of actual and possible meanings must be compressed by the sender into the smallest possible comprehensible form. Once articulated and apprehended physically by the sender, a different multiplicity of meanings is attached to the message, but not necessarily the ones that the sender intended. The idea is that if we can break down the act of communication into small enough pieces, we'll be able to do it better.

This approach is interesting because it seems to be the only one with any hope of success despite being completely backwards--searching for meaning by going from the many to the one, rather than the one to the many (as is the ideal approach of art). The problem then seems to be the loss of poetry, but I'd only sound psychotic if I got into that. Reversing entropy might be impossible, but if we can understand it maybe we can use it, or something?