Slashdot Mirror
The Regulon
Can modern media be killed? Does information have any natural predators? Or will it grow exponentially, forever, until it approaches the Omega Point -- the computer-science fatalist theory that continued rapid change eventually leads to something that dramatically transforms the fundamental situation of people in the universe. Is there any way -- natural, electronic or organic -- to stop information from proliferating?
The answer from New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik, who fled the States for Paris, in part, so his child could get a respite from the American information explosion, is a firm No. In this age, media defy natural laws of the survival of species. Lots of information languishes, is ignored, or ends up stranded in dead links and ghost sites, but it only seems to replicate.
In his engaging book Paris To The Moon, Gopnik describes a visit to an intellectual salon where an economist lectured on exponentiality.
"Exponentiality is fatality," the economist announced, explaining that the exponential proliferation of biological life -- each codfish has a million offspring; each young codfish has a million of its own -- means that the codfish, or slime mold or antelope, would cover the earth unless something stopped it.
"Therefore," Gopnik quotes the economist as saying, "there must exist in the biological sphere a principle, which I will call the Regulon, which prevents this from happening."
Gopnik wisely points out that Darwin pretty much covered this ground. Predators will eat most of the codfish. Most of the remainder die. Life is hard, and members of many species don't make it.
But I remained fixated on the idea that there is no Regulon in the Semiosphere, no natural barrier to the endless flow and reproduction of electronic information. We have no way to keep CNN, weatherman, flamers, spammers, Web site designers, e-do gooders and nit-picking coders, pundits, zealots, smart-asses and grumps in check. Each is breeding information and media. We can't stem or steer the natural proliferation of movies, TV shows, books, songs, poems, pitches, spins, videogames, junk mail, ads, Washington talk shows and radio hosts.
The global economy remains a chimera. It's really much more about the flow of information than of goods. It's information that's being globalized, at least within the English-speaking world, information that's proliferating at a rate that suggests that media are not subject to Darwin's theories. Information can't be killed or curbed unless you want to live like the Unabomber.
The early hackers opened a Pandora's Box by proclaiming that information wants to be free. Increasingly it is free, but nobody dreamed there would be so much of it, spreading so wildly. Look at media coverage of sensational stories -- like the death of Princess Di, the O.J. Simpson trial, the Monica Lewinsky mess or the recent electoral nightmare. In the absence of a Regulon, information could proliferate to the point that it overwhelms us. Picture a world in which all those codfish live.
With so many Web sites, Web logs, mailing lists, networks, magazines, instant messages, conferences, shows, gasbags, lobbyists, experts, scholars, junk mail and politicians bombarding us that we really have no idea what might or might not be true. The public is beseiged to the point of stalemate, a possible explanation of the dead tie in the presidential election. In the absence of natural selection, information spreads. And spreads.
Media seem to live apart even from accepted business rules. Companies like Disney, Microsoft and G.E. all want to own and make media sites -- Slate, CNN, ABC News, MSN, MSNBC -- even if they aren't profitable and have no chance of ever succeeding, viewing them as synergistic economic necessities. So the sites aren't subject to the economic or social versions of laws that govern biological species like the codfish. It no longer seems to even matter if they have readers or how many. This isn't to say that all media is consumed or successful. There are now a billion Web sites out there. How many have you been on? And dead links are everywhere in cyberspace. Still, they aren't technically dead, just dormant.
This suggests that information is creating its own eco-system, a meme-driven, self-replicating technology that won't quit and can't be killed.
Or can it? Gopnik says you can kill some of it by pulling plugs, but in an increasingly wireless world, that may not be an option for long. Can anything destroy it? Will it self-destruct naturally? Maybe not. As the Net continues to decentralize -- Open Source, freenet, Gnutella, P2P, Napster -- it seems inevitable that media will also continue to grow, exponentially at an even faster rate. Everybody who makes it to the Net or the Web can produce information, pass it along and replicate it, share music, video and text files; create Web pages; open e-mail and other accounts; join mailing lists and Web logs, store material. And that's with only half of Americans having access to computers, and a fraction of the rest of the world's population. The number of people generating their own information will multiply in coming years, while the people already generating information will simply be producing more of it?
Governments, potentially, could seek to censor the Net and reverse the free flow of information. But none has yet emerged that seems up to the task technologically, even if they like the idea ideologically. Certainly the miserable efforts of the U.S. Congress to pass Communications Decency Acts failed spectacularly.
Corporations have a better shot at curbing information, but they have no motive to do so. Microsoft and AOL/Time-Warner, along with the music companies have the legal ability and access to technical resources. But they want to make more information and they want to profit from its spread, especially once they figure out how to charge for it, as Bertelsmann is trying to do with Napster. And they are increasingly dependent in information for their own business operations.
As for traditional institutions like religion, academe, law enforcement and politics, they haven't got a prayer at keeping up. The teenagers writing code are light years ahead of them when it comes to creating and circumventing new information technologies. No member of the clergy or school principal can reverse the trend, and most parents have quit trying. They know their kids need computers to survive in the world; they know they can't control them once they turn the machines on. Apart from some pathetic efforts with blocking and filtering software, adults mostly cross their fingers and hope the young are headed somewhere healthy.
Concludes Gopnik: "There is No Regulon in the Semiosphere is a wildly abstract way of saying that there is no 'natural predator' to stop the proliferation" of media. They do and will, he suggests, overwhelm the world, and with it reality.
"It is hard to see how you save the carousel and the musical horse in a world of video games not because the carousel and musical horse are less attractive to children than the Game Boy, but because the carousel and the musical horse are single things in one fixed place and the video games are everywhere, no Regulon to eat them up."
Where do you think the MPAA and RIAA come in? Certaintly not an advocate of the proliferation of electronic information...
Hold on... I'm having an epiphany here... Feels like a deep one...
Yes! That's it! That's the reason! Media are not species, and thus are not bound by the laws governing organisms! Wow! Jon Katz has led me to the mountaintop yet again...
OK,
- B
--
http://www.bradheintz.com/
- updated
Information is Darwinian.
If someone puts forth an idea or some information and others find it interesting or at the least entertaining, it flurishes and spreads. Eventually, as with everything else, it fades into history.
If an idea is unpopular or nobody cares, it dies and is forgotten about, sometimes forever.
Information is Darwinian in the fact that the strong (popular) ideas survive, and the weak (unpopular) ones die off.
Some information will live until the end of time, some may be forgotten quickly, and some may never be revealed at all but each will flurish due to how many people agree/disagree or care/don't care about it.
And some help from an English teacher as well, I fear.
--------------------------------------------- "In the end, we're all just water and old stars."
So finally, sombody realises that a computer virus has got a noble goal: to safe us from the ever growing information monster.
People who write virus killers should be prosecuted for endangering the human species. The noble virus must not be hindered to complete it's task of being the predator on the information monster, killing it by saying "I love you, Melissa!" This show of affection will surely demolish the pure evil that is information.
I'm glad somebody set this straight.
Sig (appended to the end of comments I post, 54 chars)
Hey who allowed this post?
Universal darwinism is Universal... but it
doesn't prevent the formation of ESS (Evolutionary
stable systems). You guyz should start reading
ethology books again before making stupid
affirmation.
I'm not saying this is a bad thing, I'm sure some predator would have taken me down in high school. But isn't Katz kind of missing the point by trying to apply biological anologies to an abstract entitity when it doesn't even apply to the biologicals that created the abstract concept?
--
Gonzo Granzeau
Gonzo Granzeau
"Nothing the god of biomechanics wouldn't let you into heaven for.." -Roy Batty
Bit rot, format obsolescence, access decay. Unwanted information becomes unreadable, unintelligible, and unreachable. Thus is the Regulon (who makes up these words?) implemented.
Just a few thoughts
Extended analogies usually add confusion to a topic rather than clearing it up. This article illustrates that principle rather well.
because unless you absolutely know... it's all thats left.
"But I remained fixated on the idea that there is no Regulon in the Semiosphere, no natural barrier to the endless flow and reproduction of electronic information. We have no way to keep CNN, weatherman, flamers, spammers, Web site designers, e-do gooders and nit-picking coders, pundits, zealots, smart-asses and grumps in check. "
/. moderation, kind of. Is it really information if nobody bothers to read it (a one-hand-clapping thing)? The root of the word is INFORM, and if I get no meaningful data from something, then I haven't been informed.
Yes, we do. The crap sinks to the bottom. It's like the way that google.com works: important things are most likely linked to from other sites. The more links, the more important. Or by the number of successful search queries.
One can post thier views, information, etc on the internet, but if its not noteworthy, it won't draw attention. Natural selection exsists on the net. And on
Like this Katz article. I'm sorry, but this time Katz hasn't pushed my thinking anywhere.
Dirk
I keep trying to pick fights, but I can't shake this Excellent karma.
Aren't consumers the regulons?
If a form of media is not popular, i.e. does not make money, it will die.
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Moderator's essentials
This article repeats one point over and over again: Information will grow unchecked, and eventually overwhelm us.
However, the author's rant seems to be nonsensical. You cannot apply Darwin's theories to non-organic things. Information does not reproduce by itself, it does not compete with us for food, and it doesnt even take up that much space. I can go buy a 60 Gb hard drive, and I can fit an enormous amount of information in the physical space that a hamstar would take up. Guess what else? I can format the sucker if it gets too full. In the parlance of this article, this would be equivalent to dropping an A-bomb on aa rainforest ecosystem.
Data exists at our whim, we can do what we want with it. If you are feeling overloaded by it, turn off your computer.
The 'regulon' you're looking for here, the limiting factor, is humanity's limits to absorb this information. If there is not a demand for it, the information won't be replicated, and therefore won't exist in any substantial sense.
When I go home at night, I have to perform a careful balancing act, like most technically minded people with real lives I would guess, to do a little surfing, read a little news. Watch a little anime that I've downloaded from Alt.binaries.multimedia.anime. Then I do something that does *not* involve the rest of the world or the internet. I spend time with my wife. I play a game. I read a real, print book. I write or draw. I spend time working on my 3d artwork.
I discard over 99% of the information available to me, and refuse to let it take away the kind of life I want to live. The information that I'm not interested in simply dies with me. It doesn't get passed on to anyone I know or reproduced on my website for general consumption. It has 6 billion other ways to procreate, but will not do so through me.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
But, by this logic, humans dont' follow darwinian theory either, because we have no natural predators. We are at the top of the food chain, unless information is above us...
What does he mean that modern press has no Darwinian pressures? If they can grab more readers they can sell more ads, and if they can sell more ads they can advertise themselves elsewhere, buy better content, and grab even more readers. The media entities that don't have anything to say will be ignored and eventually die off when their founder's interest wanes.
Debian - the distro for the sensible Linux user. Now available in 3 delicious varieties!
You are forgetting the input part of the equation. Humands need Apples, media needs eyeballs. Without the eyeballs they die.
--
Aldous Huxely's vision of a world where we are so overwhelmed by information that we become numb to it. Apathy may be the result of the tidal wave of media available on the net and elsewhere. How can we begin to sort through what is meaningful and what should be scrapped?
"You can't play with my yo-yo"
The problem most people have with media is that it's just the opposite; the media want to control the flow of information, not make it available. And that's why the success of media has nothing to do with the success of dispersing information. Like any other powerful group of corporations, their object is to completely control their product. It's just our sense of information being more of a basic right than material goods that makes them seem to be different (and more evil, to most /.'ers).
Businesses don't have predators so much -- they have competitors, and have to fight for public interest. The media is no exception. They don't deserve any different treatment or regard than we give any other company.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
IMHO,though it's not very effective right now(and less so in the face of increasing performance:cost ratios, free-resources (eg. open source)) at some high level money places a cap on this effect. The same holds true in biology. If I culture organisms in an Eden of sorts (I attempt to remove all limitations) SOME limiting resource always shows up.
~It might look like I'm doing nothing, but at the cellular level I'm really quite busy
"there is no Regulon in the Semiosphere"
Yes, Jon, there is a "regulon" (what a lame neologism)
Because the "semiosphere" (just like "cyberspace") is just another BS idea. In reality, ideas must have some physical expression in order to be tranmitted to human beings. Whether that physical expression is space on a server and the cost of bandwidth, or a printed page, ultimately doesn't make much difference.
It actually costs money to serve web pages, show infomercials, and publish information. It may have seemed like there was unlimited funding for such intellectual trash during the dotcom boom, but now, such venture funding is drying up fast.
Only those bits of information for which someone is willing to *pay* will survive, because people won't spend money on publishing information if they're not getting anything back for that cost.
So, yes Jon, there is a "regulon" - the "regulon" is cost.
Yes there is a natural regulating mechanism in the 'semiosphere' - the number of consumers of information and the time that they have available to consume. Both are finite, so information can 'explode' all it wants, only so much of it can be looked at.
;) I seek out the information myself.
What Katz fails to do is establish any reason or need for regulating the flood of information. Is the fact that within the next 25 years I will be able to access the sum total of human knowledge within an instant of thinking of it somehow bad? It's not like this information is crushing in on me. Web sites don't just pop up in my browser unbidden (at least most don't
Katz's 'semiosphere' metaphor is weak at best, ludicrous more like. The biological world is finite, habits are limited in capacity, animals die, reproduce recombinantly. None of these features is present in the realm of information. Or capacity to store information grows exponentially every year. Information does not reproduce, and there is no natural limit to the amount of information we can store. There does not need to be a 'regulon'.
And as always, I utterly failed to find any sort of a point in this little fluff piece. Reading stuff like this really makes me think that I, with my relatively poor writing skills and reasoning abilities could be a pundit. I'd couldn't be worse than Jon.
-josh
Thats what the media consists of anyways, humans. Once humans go so does the media. All aspects of human culture could be protrayed the same way. Quick example: does our definition of time answer to anything?
The only news we can trust is from Slashdot...
Seriously, the problem is the society has lost touch with the ideals that teach us to challenge and buck authority, be it printed media or government. While we may be literate, we do not read books anymore.
The conglomeration of cultures has created a void were the morals and civics are learned from listening to an airhead on the evening news. Those that are raised with some culture or morals or responsibility to their actions do not fall prey to these ignorant ramblings.
The peole who are the predators of this new media are those who pay lipservice to this political correctness and anti-culturalism, but do not live that way. Question. Reason. THINK.
Now while I'm no big fan of Jan Katz to say the least - I must say that this article seems a bit more grounded in reality than what he usually writes.
:-)
I may not 100% agree with him this time - but I did enjoy his rampant speculation - its nice to sit up and think every once in awhile
I've read a few comments which indicate that information is not organic - and therefore not governed by organic laws - well that is and is not the case.
The information being reffered to in this case is under the direct control of these "organic entities" and using simple logic it is possible to deduce that in fact this information can and will be affected by these organic laws.
The information may not be directly affected by this so-called "evolution" of the media - but we as a race will be.
And as the information we seek continues to shape and evolve our consciousness - then isn't it likely that other pieces of information will evolve (aka change) to reflect those differences?
Just a thought...
Gam
I love idealists not because I am one, but because they make life bearable for pragmatists such as myself.
The early Slashdotters opened a Pandora's Box by proclaiming that Katz could editorialize for free. Increasingly he is free, but nobody dreamed there would be so much of him, spreading so lamely. Look at Katz's coverage of sensational stories -- like the Virtual Community, movie reviews, or the recent Up-Up-Down-Down nightmare. In the absence of a Lame-ulon, Katz could proliferate to the point that it overwhelms us.
What a dumb theory. The regulon for information is how many people are willing to read it or use it. Since there are a finite amount of people (and time to read) then information will not spread beyond that point.
If cuttlefish multiply, eventually they run outta food and their numbers will be thinned.
If nobody reads CNN then CNN will die. Plenty of sites have closed down lately due to lack of readership. Duh!
Its a good thing because if the size of Katz's articles got exponentially big, they would now be in the Terrabyte range....
There used to be a mitigating factor for the free flow of information, at least in the News Media... that of "Journalistic Integrity".
It was the radical concept that just because you got a new, earth-shattering lead on a story, you shouldn't necssarily use it, at least until you verified the source.
It seems now that the media races to be first to report a story, even if they're wrong. The recent state-calling debacle in the U.S. Election is one example. The Emulex hoax where a fake Press Release was sent out and news organizations ran with it without confirming the contents with the company was another. (Just seeing the "Press Release" was proof enough for them, I suppose.)
Decentralized information (in general, not just in the News Media) is only worth something if you know a little about the source (and thus, render it somewhat less than truly decentralized). Anybody who has downloaded badly-ripped MP3's from Napster knows that lesson...
As you can see Jon Katz is living proof that indeed "natural selection" does not exist for "reporters" such as himself.
What more needs to be said, just look at all of the articles he has "published" to date.
Utter rubbish.
This doesn't sound like it is very well concieved. How can you speak of something being Darwinian (or not) unless you have correctly identified a replicator. The replicator is not "the media", but rather "the message". And the messages (or memes, or idea viruses, or whatever) are subject to natural selection. Unfortunately, the shortest, easiest-to-remember, and least-sophisticated ones tend to win. But that's another matter. "The media" are mere propagation vectors, and owning a propagation vector is very inexpensive nowadays. So why fear "the media"?
The "cue the foo posts in 3, 2, 1..." posts will commence with no subsequent foo posts in 3, 2, 1...
i disagree. information uses a different transport mechanism - 'memes'. google that up kiddi3s...
The dictionary definition, and Dawkins's (1976) original conception of the meme, both include the idea that memes are copied from one person to another by imitation. We therefore need to be clear what is meant by imitation. Imitation is distinguished from contagion, individual learning and various kinds of non-imitative social learning such as stimulus enhancement, local enhancement and goal emulation. True imitation is extremely rare in animals other than humans, except for birdsong and dolphin vocalisation, suggesting that they can have few or no memes. I argue that more complex human cognitive processes, such as language, reading, scientific research and so on, all build in some way on the ability to imitate, and therefore all these processes are, or can be, memetic. When we are clear about the nature of imitation, it is obvious what does and does not count as a meme. I suggest that we stick to defining the meme as that which is passed on by imitation.
What?
End of lesson. You may press the button.
Turn off the computer.
Turn off the TV.
Turn off the radio.
Turn off the cell phone.
There, you're the "Regulon". Isn't free will marvelous?
Oh wait: you had these things on because you liked them! Well, then there isn't a problem, is there?
The theory of evolution can ONLY be applied to biological phenomena, because it relies on a positive-feedback mechanism that works at the level of human DNA.
Expecting it to apply to "information" or "culture" or any other "social" (non-biological) phenomena is just plain stupid. There is no identifiable feedback mechanism.
Anyone who considers this insightful should probably build themselves a giant bomb-shelter and stock it full of cheap cybernetic fiction... all the better to shelter themselves from the H-bomb of 'information-overload' their systems just can't take.
there is a child crying. I do not know the child, but it cries nonetheless.
Somewhere in the world, a dot.com is going under. I do not know the dot.com or the information they produced, but they are going under nonetheless.
Somewhere in the world, a grandmother is creating a web page of her grandchildren's pictures. I do not know the grandmother or her grandchildren, and I will never visit her web page, but the page is created nonetheless.
Just because something is happening somewhere in the world doesn't mean I have to be cognizant of it. The Net gives us the ability to be cognizant of everything. Having the ability to do something is not a requirement that it be done.
At the heyday of the industrial age, people moving from remote farms to the city would be overwhelmed by all the noise and 'hustl-n-bustle'. People who had grown up in the city were quite used to the noise and activity, and subconsciously filtered it all out.
The internet is the new city. Those who spend time here learn to filter the noise to the point where it isn't even noticed. Newbies come and feel that they must read every word of every article. They must know the city as well as they knew their farmstead. The gurus out there know that you ignore everything except what is important to you.
As for exponential growth being fatality, the argument is that as a species grow larger than the ability of the environment to support them, the species will die out. But I pose the question, what happens when the environment is growing exponentially, say along the lines of Moore's Law?
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
The fact of the matter is that information on the internet is not inherently longer lived or less subject to "predation" than information in any other source. The main problem with "information overload" on the internet at present is due to the lack of high quality indexes. "Portal sites" mostly follow the method of Yahoo, i.e. a large collection of categorized links with very little descriptive information and no rankings as to the "quality" of the site in question. Eventually, such things will improve, making it easier to find the "good stuff" and ignore the "bad stuff". Personally, even know I find that there isn't nearly as much stuff on the Internet as I'd like, there are huge chasms of information missing that I am interested in (and I'm sure I'm not alone here). No, the internet isn't some fabulously new phenomenon that will destroy our brains because there's so much information on it.
Also, did anyone else think that the writer of this article was being a little uhhh pretentious maybe? Using big words and 1337 post modern philosophy jargon to make the article sound more profound?
Gopnik's book is brilliant, i definitely recommend it.
wray
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hello this is bruno brooks, umm, err, cunt.
what the hell is a semiosphere?
is this a newfangled buzzword to take the place of words like dataverse or cyberspooge or "mediaspace" ????
and furthermore what the hell is a regulon?
it sounds like it could be a new anti-faltulance drug that some pharmaceutical company is about to dump billions of dollars into marketing to hip young vegetarians who eat alot of legumes.
can someone dumb this down for me? i think katz is trying to talk over my head again.
"Tension is the great integrity" -- R. Buckminster Fuller
Or was it one of the Godzilla movies?
Shouldn't that be something like this?
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Jon, you're only allowed to make up one word in an article, and you made up two in the first paragraph!
Can I just point out that the English language is complex enough without pretentious journalists adding words exponenetially? Where is the regulation? If we keep adding all these words at this rate in a few decades the English language will end up being some kind of incomprehensable dribble. French will seem sensible by comparison! Please stope adding new words. Think of the non-english speaking minorities that have to learn all the new words! Please won't someone think of the children!
but they caught me before I could gun down more then a dozen tabloid journalists.
At least I'm not an Anonymous Coward.
Content that masquerades as advertising is what this is all about ... companies are attempting to avoid the barrage of advertising we claim we all fear .. on your car, on your house, your street .. whatever.
Eventually we'll run out of space for billboards. There are only 24 hours in the day to run ads on television and radio.
A webpage is essensially a billboard you can create out of mid-air. One page can house dozens of 'advertising' links or promotions, and it doesn't take up any space in our physical world.
The danger is that there is no reason to not show more advertising. If Disney shows 20,000,000 ads this year, and you're Fox, you are essentially forced to show 20,500,000 ads. Then Disney goes to 30,000,000 ads. A company running a branding campaign's mission is simply to show you their name/logo more ofte than The Other Guy (tm). Product quality is almost a moot point now. Virtually any corperation can create a soft-drink that tastes nice or an animated feature that you kids beg you to go see. So you just have to make sure you're on the top of the list in the person's head when they think about that soft-drink to drink or what movie to see or what toy to purchase. There's no reason to scale back, if you own the 'billboard' and it costs you a fixed value per year. There is absolutely nothing in the capitalist model that encourages scaling back on 'brand'-style campaigns. If you can just add another web page and find some way to make people come to it, then you've essentially side-stepped the physical limitations of advertising. And it's advertising that's keeping the internet alive; believe it.
If something has never been said/seen/heard before, best stop to think about why that is.
"Old man yells at systemd"
Consider:
With these points in mind, actually keeping hold of relevant points becomes the effort, and as such, more and more effort is being put into identifying strongly significant data and rejecting the less significant, allowing it to slowly degrade, or perchance to be maintained by small groups for who the data is actually relevant.
All systems have a level of complexity (the lambda value, if memory serves me correctly), where the level of complexity is balanced between order and chaos sufficient to produce a stable, yet flexible entity.
If the constraints are placed on this system (lawyers, corporations, patents etc) in excess, then the system will die, due to being able to change sufficiently to progress to the next required state.
If the signal to noise ratio goes too low (Spam, spurious sites, too many sites with too little content become prominent) then again, the system will atrophy due to not being able to provide any valid information.
The internet, as I see it, is already a living entity. And as such, has it's own protection systems in place. As I see them, these are:
This will entail the net becoming more like as of old. Academic, and the exchange of ideas. Again, a strong signal with little background noise.
All the above take is just a little time.. Which is proving to be the great leveller of all things.
Just my tuppence worth,
Malk
Eventually the amount of information in the world will reach a critical mass where there is so much noise in it all that people will just ignore the vast majority of it. I would suggest that this is already the case in fact.
Think about it, in the vast space that is the Internet, how much of it do you use on a routine basis? How much of it is actually useful to you in some fashion? Yet it keeps growing, so it just means that you're ignoring more of it which really puts very little strain on you.
Now, you might think that eventually we come to a problem where, because of all the noise, we have trouble finding things. This is not a problem either. Think about it, how do you find information now? You go to sites that have traditionally provided you with relavent search results or you talk to friends and ask them. You use filters to limit that vast amount of information into a more managable form.
Now, as for the media, those who produce information (to define it very loosely), they are in fact limited in how much they can grow. There's only so much information that people can actually consume. Increasingly we see competition for people's attention between TV, Internet, Radio, Books, etc. Only so much of your day can be reasonably spent on gathering information so the market for these services is limited. So, they must compete with eachother to provide, not just MORE content, but more USEFUL content.
As the media have tried to expand the number of hours that the average persons spends consuming media, people have show greater interest in getting "off-line". This is a strong indication that the fundamental limits of time people are willing to commit to media consumption are being reached now.
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This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
Just because its growing very fast does not mean it has no limit. When a new type of cod is introduced, it often sweeps not only through the existing cod comunity. It also sweeps through new communities where the old cod could not exist. Here now information is finding its way into other areas that had never help information before. That does not imply that there is not limit to its reaches. Eventually the cod fills all the oceans, seas, rivers and lakes. but it is still water based. A later improvement of the cod will be required to conqure land. Another example would be the African Bee in North America. It is spreading realtivly unchecked. But it will never make it to the point that it is everywhere.
Any sort of ecosystem, from the one the fish live in to the media you describe follows the law of the minimum. The least-present quantity of a necessary ingredient regulates the rate at which proliferation can happen. Your codfish can only proliferate up to the limits set by food and predation. I would argue that your modern media does also follow the law of the minimum and the regulating ingredient is attention.
Let's take web sites as an example. Web sites aren't run for free. They're supported via advertising revenues, corporations, and sometimes goodwill on the part of the hosting provider. If people don't look at a web site, then the ad revenues or corporate sponsorship doesn't come in, or the hosting provider gets bored with it. Since there are a finite number of people looking at the web sites, and there's only so much time in the day, then there's only a finite amount of attention (i.e. page views for web sites). If the amount of attention slips below the threshold set by ad revenues/corporate sponsorship/goodwill vs. cost of running the site, then the site will die.
Don't make the mistake of 1998 stock market investors who thought that the uphill run was forever because that's all they had ever seen.
What they're saying is, we should release lions onto the streets to eat the mailmen, crocodiles into the TV studios to eat the TV execs, and pack wolverines in with computers to eat webmasters/hackers/programmers? Hmm... ok, let's do it!
Anyway... something should be done (though not what I suggested) to get rid of the sea of info that is spreading throughout the world... It's only a matter of time before there are billboards on every street, advertisement banners (and "news" banners) inside our homes, and cars with ads painted all over them. If someone teleported to today from ten or twenty years ago (without being slowly desensitized), they would be horrified at all the "news" programs on TV and all the advertizements everywhere. The same would probably happen if someone today was teleported ten or twenty years into the future unless something is done about it...
I'd be curious to hear what "feedback process" this guy thinks has regulated the evolution of information for the last 2000 years.
And information does have predators: good ideas become displaced by worse ideas which are better adapted to small minds (witness liberalism against communism and fascim in the 20th century :)
Do you actually pay Katz for this toss?
Modern media have no predators, and are not subject to biological or Darwinian-style selections
I beg to differ. Like any other organised entity, a medium depends on the availability of certain resources to function. Those resources include (but are not limited to) staff who can produce content and an audience that will consume that content and the revenue generators (such as advertisments) that fund the organisation. Either can be in short supply and if so, those organisations that most effectively use the resources will survive at the expense of those who don't. That's the nature of natural selection.
ben_ the technologist and platform agnostic
All this media, immersed in information constantly, blah blah blah The fact is, our media experiences are "mediated" by the needs of profit driven businesses that treat our attention span as a commodity to be bought and sold and traded. We are segmented and micro-target marketed to. If you don't like that all-pervasive, "hey, i'm soaking in it" feeling, then get off the bus and start taking control of how and why you consume and participate in the dis-intermediation of our lives. Take a walk. Have a conversation. Whatever.
DaBuddha
As it was, it is now, and always shall be.
I really don't see what the problem is here...
If a slime mold covers up the world, it's bad because everything else dies, incapable of receiving light. That's really bad.
But information (in itself) isn't harming people.
So, I'm going to give Jon Katz the benefit of the doubt and assume that he is joining the party of Internet intellectuals (such as the recently mentioned Caleb Carr), that is fond of saying, "People are getting information, but they aren't forming a framework out of that information." (Caleb's solution was to put a "truth rating" on every web tidbit...)
It is true; If you are into the advancement of mind, this is indeed a great obstacle. But I don't think it's a new thing. Perhaps I should complain, "People are learning things on the net, but they aren't learning that these are things that have always been true, and will be true in the future."
Sometimes I read these Internet Pundits, and it just sounds like they are shouting this remarkably arrogant, "Just Get Smarter!"
People have lives, jobs, family, emotions, issues that they are sorting out, mystic quests and sagas, dramas, vengences, whatever. There's a lot more than just this mental churning going on out there. People don't necessarily want a coherent mental framework. Personally, I think it's really important, and a good thing. Consistency and clarity are nice. But I wouldn't go around saying, "Morasses of information are falling on these poor rubes who can't figure out how to seperate the wheat from the chaff" as if the sky was falling.
A particularly odd post by JonKatz.
the media regulator is a hybrid of market forces and prevalent political structure. both elements combine to shape what media products are consumed, and by whom, and to what purpose.
to control media, therefore, you must control the market (people as well as capital) that consumes media, as well as the organizations that govern the market (people or capital).
currently, only a few immensely wealthy individual shareholders hold the power to direct the course of these elements, to control media to a particular end. so if you are looking to reshape media to a specific purpose, you must look in this direction.
Jon Katz asks for biologists to comment. I'm a biologist and my research (HIV virus drug resistance) involves Darwinian evolution about as directly as one ever sees it on human time scales. That said, in my experience, Darwinian reasoning applied to cultural phenomena are mostly dis-analogies: just similar enough to mislead and obscure rather than illuminate and explain. They are more often than not just modern myth-making masquerading as science, a haven for lazy, armchair speculators. An often repeated complaint among evolutionary biologists is that it is the field of science with the largest number of people who think they understand it but don't. In the case of information, as others have pointed out already, human attention is finite and limiting and serves to winnow what information is saved and transmitted. There is a crude evolutionary analogy here but it does not in my opinion get you any further than just good sense. There may be interesting evolutionary facets to how we as social primates deal or don't deal with abundant information but that is a different subject. In addition, the notion of attention as an important rate-limiting step in modern human culture is interesting but is hardly original and only tenuously connected to evolution. There are many lifetimes of good honest work to be had in the study of real evolution without treking into lame cultural analogies.
Do we need these people who make analogies between totally unrelated subjects - draw conclusions without proving the analogy is worthy - and waste our time by stiring everyone's deep fear of the attack by mutant radioactive killer information?
Relinquish
uh, yes, that is actually happening: lack of resources (water, light, room, heat, food) and predation stops it.
Therefore, Gopnik quotes the economist as saying, there must exist in the biological sphere a principle, which I will call the Regulon, which prevents this from happening.
uh, no: Darwinian theory presupposes no such thing. There are only limiting factors (see above). By the look of it, either Katz, Gopnik or said economist are confused. A regulon (by the description given here) is utter teleological nonsense. Pretty much all that is needed for the sponaneous emergence of order is an information carrying medium, a coping mechanism, and an entropy sink (the Sun). Oh, and some time :-)
Seems I read an old Scientific American article once that related information to energy and entropy. Without energy input to a system it decays, increasing entropy and losing info content. They actually did a rough calculation involving the amount of energy received from the sun, and the earth's existing and potential information content. The dramatic conclusion: you ain't seen nothing yet. This was like in the 50's or 60's, and the author pointed out that the amount of energy received could support a HUGE amount of information, which we had just barely begun to tap at the time, and probably aren't much further along even now.
This supports my thesis that, altho there may be an economic slump at the moment, the upside potential going forward afterwards is tremendous - that is, the "latest and greatest" info systems of today and the near future are going to look quite primitive someday.
The future's so bright....
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Sorry Jon, but you can't just make these sweeping statements with no backup. I know they're opinion pieces, but they taught me in high school and college to back up even my own words with some kind of logical following.
Information can't be killed or curbed
...and why should it have to be? I think the fundamental flaw in your essay is the assumption that this proliferation of information means we all have to be aware of it at all times. Certainly, without a unabomber-esque retreat, we are bombarded with information at all times, but could you explain why this is fundamentally different than television, radio, and printed material decades ago? The Internet and Web allow more caching of information, but no one is holding your screen to your eyes forcing you to look at every piece of it. There is more information on the Web than on television, but with the Web, you can SEARCH SELECTIVELY for what you need.
In the absence of natural selection, information spreads. And spreads.
Not really. Stored information is passive; you seem to assume some sort of active spreading, threatening to cover the globe in copies of "The National Enquirer" and episodes of "Survivor." The truth, as usual, lies somewhere rather distant from the brink of catastrophe from which most of your essays are written. The glut of information AVAILABLE doesn't indicate that our days are all spent subjugated to absorbing it.
[D]ead links are everywhere in cyberspace. Still, they aren't technically dead, just dormant.
Um, excuse me? Could someone please explain this to me?
[I]nformation is creating its own [...] self-replicating technology that won't quit and can't be killed.
I disagree completely. The natural predators to information spread are 1) apathy and 2) awareness. If no one cares that, say, my great-aunt's cat had seven toes on one foot, that information won't spread. And if people are aware, they can avoid information they don't want. I, personally, never watched the OJ trial or a single episode of "Survivor." Not to pass value judgements on those who did, but they held no appeal for me. That information stopped spreading at me.
Perhaps the ultimate "Regulon[s] in the Semiosphere" will be human qualities like taste and nostalgia. The carousel will survive alongside video games BECAUSE it is solid and fixed; sometimes we are willing and able to ignore the pernicious spread of information and simplify.
The only way content which should be weeded out remains is if the writer has been established as a popular content provider. For example, a unique look at school environments following the Columbine shooting could give a writer enough street cred to collect a check for months and months of useless drivel about the nature of "Open Media". However, if that writer does not produce anything worth reading or discussing long enough, people will eventually drift away.
If a writer pontificates on the web and it gets no no hits, is he really being published?
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
"Modern media have no predators, and are not subject to biological or Darwinian-style selections -- the Regulon. Thus media can proliferate eternally, overwhelming coherence and reality"
You make the media sound like some virus that can take over normally rational though processes to obtain a life of its own.
A closer analogy would be the media is creating information like a DNA sequence. On it's own the DNA can do nothing. It requires a biological system to transcribe and translate the DNA into protein sequences that perform a useful function.
In a sense, the media feeds the human mind raw information. The human brain transcribes and translates this information into ideas. We filter out the ideas that don't seem right or are counter to our experience. If enough brains translate this information into ideas that make sense, a consensus develops and those ideas have a greater chance of surviving.
So modern media does have a formidable natural predator in the brains of the millions of humans.
The regulon in this case is simple supply and demand. If people did not give such high television ratings to events such as the OJ Trial, the Lewinski scandal etc. etc. no television network would bother to cover it beyond the two days that it would take to figure out that no one cares. Many people decry the media overkill; however, our media is not a charity. If we did not consume the product that the media produces, it would simply dry up and go away.
In a sense, we're not making more information; we're simply making better ways of getting the information to the consumer. To use the fish analogy--we're not growing more codfish, we're making it easier for the codfish to get to the predators that will ultimately consume them.
--
"And that's the world in a nutshell -- an appropriate receptacle."
-- Stan Dunn
Where is the DNA of a meme?
Now, granted, Katz does have a point. But seeing one of the main proponets (and abusers) of the "Information wants to be free" mantra do a complete about face and say that freedom of information is a terrible evil is just too much to take.
For better or for worse, information has been freed. I don't think that having all this information available is a bad thing. It's the totally uncontrolled distribution of mis-information (like the scare tactics used in this article) which should be looked at with fear, or maybe pity. But having Jon Katz complain that "gasbags" are producing too much "information" is just about enough to make a person choke to death.;-).
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I think this is a non-problem, except for Katz who seems annoyed at spammers et al.
:)
If there were a Regulon in the Semiosphere, then all the reporters who once covered the OJ trial would be looking to get their old jobs back. I look at the OJ trial as a seminal event in the history of media. Much like the Watergate trial was, only the media are more savvy this time around. The OJ trial helped create a monster media force filled with 'gasbags' who created their own market.
But the Regulon in the Semiosphere would have to be the law of supply and demand, the market forces. The Internet now makes the free flow of information so cheap that the market forces are much much weaker. So the Regulon in the Semiosphere is just a weak force, allowing for a greater proliferation of information.
So, no, there will remain a proliferation of cheap media. But tell me, Jon, why is that a problem? I get the impression that you don't like it, and that's fine, we are all entitled to our opinion. But simply because one would prefer a different reality is not sufficient reason to change the one that exists naturally. Spamming is and should be illegal, as would, say, stock fraud, and some important forms of misinformation. But the principles of Freedom admit to the possibility of a cacophonous throng, and fairly embrace it.
I didn't really have anything to say, I just like saying "Regulon in the Semiosphere."
SDMI: Finally! Music that won't rip or burn! Brought to you by the fine folks at RIAA.
A second flaw in the reasoning is the presumption that there is a problem with finite resources for storing information. In fact, the problem is finite resources in each individual for processing information. This was true long before the emergence of the internet. Even before my birth, there were more books in the Bedelian than anyone could read in his lifetime.
Rather than rely on strained metaphors to predators, we should look at George Stigler's old paper "The Economics of Information" (Journal of Political Economy, 69(3), 213-225 (1961)) and realize that we already have the tools we need to deal with the glut of information: informed reviewers whom we trust. Analogous to PGP's web of trust, we seek out people whose taste and judgement we trust and look to them to recommend things worth reading. This is how I pick books, movies, and internet sites to spend my time with.
Some gems may be lost in the flood of information, as I ignore anything that is not recommended by someone I trust, but there's nothing new there. I am already missing out on lots of good books.
This points to the real danger, which Katz alludes to but fails to recognize---that most people will choose poor guides through the labyrinth of information. They will purchase books by Stephen King and Tom Clancy because they are featured by Barnes and Noble. They will go to movies that get big play on mainstream talk shows. They will look at web sites that major portals link to.
All this shows is that information technology did not bring anything new, despite John Maynard Keynes's prediction that technology would supply workers with unprecedented leisure time, which they would spend reading the classics in Greek.
Jon is trying to argue here that information has no natural limits or predators which will keep its proliferation in check. This idea is wrong.
First of all information has to occupy some type of medium such as film, magnetic tape, optical disc, canvas, printed page, whatever which has a finite capacity for information. As the media is filled to capacity some information is going to be disposed of. What do you do when your hard drive gets full? You remove what's not important by deleting or moving it somewhere else. Sounds like natural selection to me. The world's capacity for information is enormous; just because we can't see its limit doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
My second point is that information does have predators due to the fact that it is bound to such mediums. These are lightning, age, damage, corrosion, and any other factor which might cause the loss of data. In fact, an article was posted on /. just yesterday about worry over an EMP attack on the United States' information infrastructure. These factors are the same reason why we have lost much of Hollywood's early films, countless paintings from centuries passed, and other forms of information that we will never have again.
Is information indestructible? I really don't think so, but it makes for a good topic for Jon to ramble on.
That you had when high, or after working for sixty-four hours, drinking jolt and coffee. Are really kind of stupid. Such is the case with this. I'm not trolling here, but this is dumb. Infinite information has no predators? How about all the OTHER information that wants that same space? Surely you realize that most of this information is just copies of the same seven thousand jpeg pr0no pictures anyway? And besides, the whole premise of this is stupid, smoke less dope, it kills brain cells.
The proof that Gopnick and Katz are wrong on this one is the fact that anyone who hates Jon can set their preferences so they don't have to see his column.
The proof they are right is the fact that most Katz-haters are too stupid to figure out how to do this.
Eternal vigilance only works if you look in every direction.
Unlimited exponential growth requires unlimited resources. Sooner or later you start running low on certain resources and when that happens competition kicks in - competing for the limited resource. Your competitors may try to grab that resource more better than you (more efficient herbivores) or simply try to kill you and get the resources you have successfully gathered (carnivores).
In the case of media I believe the resource that runs out the most quickly is mindshare. There are only so many names that the public can remember. When you have a bigger audience it increases mindshare because not everyone needs to remember all the names, there can be some specialization and interest groups.
The important point, though, is that the public's mindshare capacity grows at a sublinear rate. This means that an audience twice as large can remember less than twice as many different names. The reason for this is that in order to grab mindshare a name does not need to reach a certain number of minds, it needs to reach a certain density, or percentage of the minds because names tend to fade away quite quickly unless you keep hearing them mentioned by your peers. The name needs to reach a certain percentage of your peer group in order to remain in your mind.
----
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
..because nobody ever stopped the free flow of information at all. Of course many attempts have been done when the media could have been controlled easily (few people able to read, less books or even no books at all...), informations were changed intentionally, but they kept flowing. Now it's even harder to stop this flow, but it is not the point: the flow is going to reach a certaim level anwyay, even if it was little.
./? With no particular issue. More information didn't make much difference, I found my way trough life even without knowing the habits of New Zealand's ants.
Let's take slashdot: a lot of articles are posted, I am now afraid of having lost something because I'm hungry of information. But then? What happens when I read an article about quantum computing? Am I going to teach it to someone?
It's just for me, for my own sake. How did I live when I wasn't reading
Browsing the Net today it's like being into a huge library and being able to access any kind of information, as long as this information is requested by many people (sortof on the lower shells). When you want to access something less common you have to go and dig or climb to find what you need (if you don't get tired before).
Have you ever tried to spend a whole day in a library just picking up books, reading few lines, and then putting them down? What have you gained at the end of the day? In most cases nothing at all, just a lot of ideas.
Sometimes few information you can remember, other times (if you're lucky) you'll have found something that really grasps you and something to do for the rest of your life.
My point here is: having a lot of information going around it's not a bad thing: statistically it's better for everybody, because virtually anybody can access data which had been impossible to reach just few years ago.
Statistically more and more people can find what they need, for their lives or whatever.
The b-side? We all know that not every piece information is good, nor it is accepted by everybody. Tell me if I'm wrong, but the more you surf the Net, the less you care about 'shocking' sites or information. You just avoid it with your mind. If something shocks you, you'd probably have been shocked by it anyway, no matter when or how.
Tons of information or just few ounces don't make the difference: it's never enough when you don't find what you want, it's too much when you don't *know* what you need.
-- There are two kind of sysadmins: Paranoids and Losers. (adapted from D. Bach)
By the year 1000AD there was already more information available than any one person could ever hope to assimilate. Have you ever read (and understood, because there's more to information than just scanning it) the complete works of Plato? Probably not. But do you feel threatened by the mere presence of those unread words? Again probably not. So what's changed in modern times? How much really valuable information is there?
The other day I wanted to read up on the history of Britain before 1000AD. Rather than read a history book with all it's interpretations, I thought it would be cool to take a "clean room" approach and read the original documents that described Britain before 1000AD. Naturally I assumed they'd be out there on the Web by now. But guess what? Not only are they not on the Web, there isn't even a way to get a list of what manuscripts exist via the Web.
I just think that's kind of an interesting contrast, you feeling overwhelmed by junk information about the present whilst the most basic information about the past isn't even accessible electronically!
Of course information has a predator -- it's called entropy. Which increases with time.
Duh.
Furthermore, ever head of signal-to-noise ratio? In the case of information, you can argue that the noise (JonKatz, "My Cat Fluffy" pages, banner ads, etc.) is what interferes with the signal (intelligent websites, etc.). To try and build an analogy of predator-prey ecology around signal-to-noise is bunk.
Predator-prey is something that applies to finite-but-expanding systems. In the case of information, you could argue that it is an expanding-but-infinite system. (This goes into the arguments put forth by Wittgenstein's Tractatus on language and language creation -- each linguistic construct being completely unique.) Anything you say, write, etc., has a basic uniqueness about it -- chances are, no one is ever going to write the same thing the exact same way. The basic theme may be similar, but the overall presentation will differ radically.
Where noise comes into the Web is when you have similar information about the same subject, or pages that draw you with the promise of certain information and then present something entirely different. (Like font sites with the phrase "sexy blondes" in their META tags.)
Jon == noise.
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Yo soy El Fontosaurus Grande!
blog |
Anyone who claims information has no limiting factor, obviously hasn't had to pay a huge bandwidth bill recently.
I run a collection of fan sites for PC Games with a few other guys, and it costs a decent amount of money to send out 50 gigs of data per week. With that plus two servers, we're already talking over $1000 per month. Sure, this may sound cheap for as many people who get to enjoy the site, but since we can't charge for anything due to competition, you're lucky if you can make money with any amount of traffic. Just read any gaming news site these days, and you'll see the networks folding like lawn chairs, because banner ads just don't sell well enough. There are isloated cases where they work (this site probably does ok with them), but for the most part, our information is HEAVILY limited by distribution costs.
OddManIn: A Game of guns and game theory.
thermal dynamics, memory density and credibility. if information density reaches a high enough level, it will become indistiguishable from background noise and therefore a die off will take place. though memory density continues to increase geometrically, one assumes that at some point that it will reach a maximum, though theoretically it could be infinite. if the former is true then natural selection will take place as less important information is replaced by more important information (the criteria for this will probably be fiscal). if the latter is true, then the biological model falls apart as it is based on finite environments, and resources, if you have an infinite environment, then there is no need for a die off. if a piece of information lacks sufficient credibility to be of interest, it will eventually die of its own weight, or be killed off by those who deplore waste.
You couldn't have said it better.
Posted by polar_bear:
There are too many logical fallicies in this bit to count -- while it starts with a reasonable premise (there's too much information to be processed -- and it may be taking up too much time distracting the masses from more important matters) it really fades into babble quickly.
If you're going to discuss information and its transmission -- you might want to discuss it in terms of communication theory, not try to shoehorn the discussion into the boundaries of natural selection. Predators for information? Please.
Concerned parties may wish to read Neil Postman's "Amusing Ourselves to Death" which discusses the problems with the electronic media and the unchecked proliferation of electronic entertainment -- and what it is doing to public discourse. While I don't agree with every point that Postman makes, it's certainly a much more valid and lucid discussion than this piece of dribble.
It's counter-productive to assault Katz (or anyone else) for their faulty reasoning or pretentious posturing as an authority on these topics. The fact is they do need to be discussed. Even if the initial spark to the conversation was a bit weak, it's still a conversation worth having...
Media is not a species. It is the output of our species. Yes, we can increase our rate of output, and we are clearly doing that now. But population pressure does not apply to something which is not itself a population. We may well drown in our own output if we don't regulate it, but it remains our product, not a species unto itself.
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
This should have been from the "can-jon-katz-be-killed" department. jeb.
more closely resemble Slashdot supported flamebait than any sort of valid arguments, or even interesting ponderances. It's almost like Katz and Slashdot are pulling random words out of a hat, pasting them together and writing a over generalized and conceptually fictitious article.
you should read 'tiempo cero' (don't know the translation) by Italo Calvino. there is a love history of two persons that fell in love, from unicellular to information "persons". the two information persons need the invention of sexual reproduction to fell in love because today only cellurar division o something like that exists in information reproduction. Pardon for my english - I speak in spanish
I'm from Argentina: Tango, Asado, Mate, Gaucho, Maradona, YPF
This may have been said already,but the regulon that preys on information is self interest. There is power in information. If you know something your competitor doesn't then you can exploit that to your advantage. This works in business, war, and any other number of fields. This is the reason behind patent and IP law, I spent the money to acquire this information, therefore I should have the right to its sole use for a given period of time.
Slashdot has this neohippie view of information, that information should be free even though somebody has to spend money to create it. I think this is probably the case because many members of slashdot aren't that somebody. If they are then its usually in a computer field where information and experiments are pretty cheap by physical world standards.
In short, knowledge is power and so will always be protected by someone in order to further their self interest.
So far I've gotten all my Karma from telling people they are wrong... :)
Journalists getting out of control? Too many newsites with the same-old, same-old newstories? We don't have to just sit around while they bombard us with trivial matters portrayed as the beginning of the apocalypse. Let us pass new legislation legalising the hunting of jounalists and spamming of newsites, to pay them back for all they have put us through. Certainly, there shall have to be a designated "season" for the hunting part, but I can only foresee good coming from this.
"Come on, son! It's time to bag us Peter Jennings!"
nahtanoj
This is just like the tired concept of memes. Rather than try to understand how the human mind works, we just give up and anthropomorphize ideas, making ourselves passive receptacles and giving information the mythical ability to travel at will whether we like it or not.
The fact is, there is plenty of competition out there. I don't find most television media interesting, so I shut it off. In this hokey framework, I am acting as my own regulon. If information is cleverly presented or entertaining or informative enough, I watch it : it is selected to survive. If not, it's toast.
Attempting to apply Darwinian theory to the use of remote controls by television viewers. Now there is a useless idea that isn't fit to survive...
The entire fallacy here, I see it, is that information transmitted in evolution is different than information transmitted in technology.
Either are about the transmission AND interaction of information.
In evolution (and I'd like to note Darwin's theories are not the only ones), information interacts as well. Information in evolution is also not just from DNA - it's input from the environment in the form of learning, predation, etc. Living creatures alter their environment as well, producing more feedback.
Evolution produced us, a species almost free of its DNA, able to learn and adapt in amazing ways in very short times. The information age is a manifestation of human communications and adaption potential.
So there's no "outside" in evolution, no Regulon hanging over us externally - there is the interaction of information. The information age is merely an accelerated version.
It sounds to me like scientific materialists are trying to find a new God in the Regulon. Someone to thank for success, and someone that "we all need in our lives" for goodness and order.
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
this argument is fundamentally flawed.
the regulon in the semiosphere becomes, simply, human interest. If you consider CNN and the other sources of "e-information" as simple business, then they conform to an economic model of supply and demand. thus the regulon is borne out of societal support, which itself is a regulated process in part.
However, information as a conceptual thing is not driven by such economic pressure. nevertheless, as more than one astute post suggests, information *is* regulated at the individual level.
Accordingly, raw information does not need the kind of competition that katz suggests. it's unconsciously in the mind of the informed- every cogniscient person innately allows information to "compete" within the neural structure (a built-in regulon "feature" if you will). the darwinian equivalent of the "fittest" is the meme/concept/whatever that fits within the neural capacity of each individual. even animal thought processes work this way- an innate algorithm that establishes the best action based on prior knowledge. the "less fit" information may be simply rejected and discarded (thus fulfilling darwin's simplistic rule), or it may be retained on a "less valued" scale for future comparison.
one other minor point, the "traditional institutions" also thrive by the spread of information and are therefore not limited by the "regulon" concept as presented here.
succinctly, katz's post is an interesting intellectual study (e.g. "what if...") but it reduces to standard crap when analyzed in any detail.
This will all clear up once Warren G. and the Regulators show up and get busy.
--Brogdon
This tagline is umop apisdn.
There is a significant problem with this assertion that information will devour us all. The model is wrong. Katz contends that information on modern and future networks can promulgate itself, that computers can copy and spew information ad infinitum, without regard to a selection for quality.
The problem is, that the worries in the article are about humans being overwhelmed with this spew of information. But human minds are the medium for information, and are a limiting resource to exponentiation. The regulon, in Katz-speak. The dead information is just that, dead, and will be ignored by everyone but the computer it resides on. The information codfish that no one looks at are dead.
The new economy business model that has driven the proliferation of corporate web information cannot continue indefinitely. Companies that do not derive a profit from the information they put out will eventually be selected against. Money is the regulon of corporations, and will apply to corporate information.
"We have no way to keep CNN, weatherman, flamers, spammers, Web site designers, e-do gooders and nit-picking coders, pundits, zealots, smart-asses and grumps in check" As many previous posters point out, we do have a way to keep these in check, and our defences are evolving. Witness email filters, recent suits against spammers, the de-spamming of my address above, choosing the URLs you visit and no others, Refusing to buy from advertisements pushed upon you. I, as a reasonably intelligent modern person, can keep all this in check and more. Perhaps John Katz, as a public person, has more trouble than most in filtering his information, as so many desire to push theirs onto him. But there are options for public people. Witness Neal Stephenson's method of filtering.
The real problem is in the human capacity to understand and process. In the current state of the world, we have not yet reached this carrying capacity, and so the growth continues. The real problem is human. Are we intelligent enough to filter our information for the useful bits and keep the spew out? Are we intelligent enough to create tools to do this effectively for us? I would argue that we are.
BMagneton
-------------"Care for a little Spin?"
In the case of media, if it is uninteresting, it won't be viewed as much, it won't generate revenue, production won't be sustainable.
Katz should know better than anyone that sensationalism sells. (such as this article. Ooooooh! Big bad Media Predators! Helpless little consumers! Use the @#$@% "off" button once in a while.
Bah.
exponentiality only plays a factor when there is or can be a scarcity. There is only so much land, sunlight, soil, free O2, etc. So mold growth, viral replication, etc when grown unchecked will quickly consume all resources and start dying out and rapidly.
:)
Information consumes several resources. First and fore-most it consumes time. If "media" grew to consume 100% of time, then we'd have a recession and then a depression, and thus a death of society; course humans are more pro-active then a virus. We'd make laws, etc when enough people understood the danger.
Another resource consumed is disk space. You can't store every piece of information ever gathered by anyone. The ideal would be to have an MP3 recorder on and with you 24/7 so as to reference anything you've ever heard. Likewise with a video camera.. Beyond that, you could sense and record everything in the world 24/7 - thereby approaching omnipotence on a local scale. But the storage of this information would be impossible. Typically we record onto ferrite, and there's obviously a scarcity of metal in the world. Other's are using phosphors or plastics, but they too would be a scarcity.
So what happens in the "hard drive revolution"? Well, we use metal for quite a bit, and so to take metal away from one form of consumption produces competition and weighing of values. Look at DVD-ROM drives and cell phones.. They share a common component (don't know what, but I've read it often enough on slashdot). Because cell phones are 'exponentially growing', DVD-ROM's are prohibitively expensive. Manufacturers of course try to get around it by making them faster and thus justifying the added cost.
The danger again is the value storage above all things. So we lose the ability to use the materials for other purposes, and again humanity becomes pro-active and regulates. In reality, we have a diminishing marginal enjoyment. We're not going to record and playback information 24/7; we're going to be highly interested in other forms of recreation, or in rare cases; work.
As other's have pointed out, there is also the prospect of human memory.. Our brain is a finite storage system. To my understanding we "memorize" relations between experiences. We comprehend a sound, and relate it to some higher level concept (such as a vocabulary, or fear, etc). Most of the experiences we have are lost, and only the gist of what went on is retained - some more than others. Beyond that we'll have a fleeting interest in all the info out there. Some would love to have ready and repetitous access to espn channels 50 through 3,000. Other's would be interetsed in the discovery series 50 through 100, etc. So different personalities are going to filter that info uniquely.
Next is the issue of information predators. Well, first and foremost is the minimal resource requirements of information. Second is the reusibility of most of these resources (except time and energy consumption). You can only eat a plankton once, but you can record different MP3's to the same spot on a hard drive over time. The real predators are interest and time. You may be facinating today and thus over-write older material, but tomorrow you're old news; bye bye.. Garbage In, Garbage Out.
Next comes Darwin with Natural Selection. Information that gets discarded quickly is selected for deletion; they'll have their moment.. Mutated from similar topics of the past. Copied web sites, re-reporting news on CNN, etc. Each time they're a tiny bit different, and they just might have found the right audience; maybe Bill Mawr had a comical spin to the same info that made a certain class suddenly interested in it. But ultimately, eveything has it's time to die. And information can die at a much more massive rate than life; just like an over-population of viri in a host, once the host dies. Entire hard drives can be wiped; entire broad-casts can be over, without ever recording them.
The saturation point is where we max out all possible bandwidth. Our entire visual perifera is filled with mini windows of streaming content. Any additional information beyond this immediately dies because of lack of additional audience. Even if they are recorded, there is little chance that every moment will be revisited until a new baby is born or some other content dies. But now we're back to postulate 1 above that we're spending 100% time in information consumption. So my argument is now concluded.
-Michael
-Michael
Jon Katz here diverges from this method.
What can be said at all can be said clearly.
What can be said at all can be said clearly.
What we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence.
Darwinism doesn't make judgments about anything but "fitness to survive until reproduction." Definitely not "strongest" and maybe not even "most popular."
And that judgment is only made in the context of a particular fitness landscape of a particular time. One should expect that the fitness of a particular species of information would change over time.
Viva non-linear systems.
Eternal vigilance only works if you look in every direction.
This poster obviously doesn't understand the concept of memes, demonstrating the same lack of understanding in this area that he accuses others of having with respect to the human mind. He/She seems to think that memetic theory gives thinkers only a passive role in meme distribution, when, in fact, the opposite is true. Suggestion: If you do five minutes of research before cutting a theory down, it will be much less obvious that you've never read anything on the subject.
However, where memetics provides a useful abstraction about idea dispersion in communities, I can't see what Katz' theory is useful for. Maybe it's time to cut down on the crack, Katz?
are we always forgetting about the end consumer? who cares if there's all this information out there and nobody to regulate it? the fact of the matter is that the consumer will perform the predatory darwinism on the information. Yes, some information will lay dormant for years and years... residing in digital form on some server that's in a closet and everyone's forgotten about. But who cares?
User's will sort through the bad information. Word of mouth will come back into vogue with which news sources and media fonts to drink from. We're already doing it. I don't surf the web anymore. I only go to sites that friends recommend. Why bother?
The main problem right now is the search engines. Back in the glory days, search engines are how you ended up somewhere. Now it's all brand name media. As search technologies improve, so to will the ability to sort information to what's relevant to what you're looking for.
The web is about empowering the user/consumer, and that's what it will do to media. The Olympic Games got sucky ratings this year because media forgot about the end user. They suffered as a result of this by paying out millions and receiving a small ROI. They learned that the end user is really king, and that they can't always dictate the terms of their coverage to the consumer.
Attention is the preditor of the infosphere. All infons must compete for attention. Attention keeps infons alive. Attention derives from humans, businesses, programs, other infons, etc. Without attention infons die the death of the ignored and unwanted. Resources don't ally with the attentionless. You just have to look around to see this invisible hand working. New infons are created and by various gambits attract attention units. Naturally infons die out as other infons compete. Very few infons last long as they stop being attended to as other infons become more popular and demand more attention. It takes a lot of attention to keep and infon alive.
the internet, and all it's associated media can be thought of as an emerging central nervous system for a concious earth which is developing as we speak. why fight it? the advent of exponentional technological development (quantum computing!!!), population explosion, ad infinitum hints at a drastically more sophisticated world than the one we THINK we are heading towards right now. how long do you people really think our lives will consist of commuting to work every day and coming home to watch tv? it's no longer about the acquisition of weath but the acquisition of information and communal empathy. like the cells in our bodies that are unaware of the experiences and conciousness that we posess as humans (naively regarded as the zenith of life), it's reasonable to assume that we act as components of a much larger pattern of organic energy. subparticles -> atoms -> molecules -> cells -> organisms -> communities -> planets -> galaxies. we can't see it because it's happening on such a macro scale and the rules of biology are somewhat arcane. but it's already happening. think about corporations, governments, etcetera. now it's going global and it's happening extremely fast.
human attention is the resource which media require to survive. its slightly philosophical i guess, but to me information doesn't exist unless it's being consumed by a human. there is a finite amount of time in a human's day (and in a human's life) and all media compete to get this time (sort of like some cellular automata models compete for cpu time on virtual machines - the more well adapted CAs get more virtual machine cpu time thus giving them more cycles to reproduce than their less-adapted competition). for example, i have found local news program relatively worthless for my purposes. they simply don't seem to relay information pertinent to me or my life or even information thats interesting. i am endlessly amused, however, at the lengths they go to trying to convince people that the crap they sell (their media) is so valuable one cannot possibly live without consuming it (they overdramatize, notice how everything is a crisis. someone wrote an article about how the media has turned normal seasonal weather events into crisis - and they have their own little logos. one even titled their schpeel "nature's fury". for heavens sake, it was 8 inches of snow in philadelphia in january. is this a crisis? i digress....
At the risk of legitimizing this ridiculous idea, I'll bite. Information and media absolutely have predators, they are called "customers". If their weren't "predators" how come these media corporations compete and fight so damn hard? Money is the sword by which these media producers live and die. The idea they will proliferate ad nauseum is absurd.
Jon Katz asks for input from physicists and biologists. I am an ex-physicist and current Electrical Engineer and my wife is a neuroscientist. My input is the question is wrong. There is no Regulon. It is an exceedingly lame theory put forth by an idiot who calls himself a "futurist". By the way, the word "futurist" is a pretty good idiot detector.
The field of information theory is a hard science concerned with the ability to code, store, and transmit information between two points in an optimally efficient manner. This crap has nothing to do with information theory, it is just a loser beating off to a DVD of "The Matrix".
If you're reading this Jon, let me say I enjoy some of the things you post and I've actually read one of your books. BUT, I think you focus way too much on this kind of useless, meaningless, pompous B.S. Just saying things are so doesn't make them so.
Sure we do. It's called the "off button". Watch the last 10 minutes of The Osterman Weekend or any 10 minutes of Max Headroom.
> Look at media coverage of sensational stories -- like the death of Princess Di, the O.J. Simpson trial, the Monica Lewinsky mess or the recent electoral nightmare.
One of these things is not like the other. One of these things does not belong.
> In the absence of a Regulon, information could proliferate to the point that it overwhelms us.
The key thing about the 'net is that you are the Regulon.
Di entered my mental killfile the minute her brains entered the cement post. She serves only as a reminder that Darwin (funny you should mention him) weeds out the stupid from the gene pool without regard to one's heritage. Get in a car with a drunk driver, get outa the gene pool. The months of hysteria afterwards were just filler to sell ads.
OJ entered my mental killfile the minute he decided not to spray his brains all over his white Bronco. No more gore, not interested. The rest was just filler to sell ad space.
Lewinsky? The minute Starr decided "it's about sex", figuring he'd be able to piss off enough Republicans in Congress to impeach and convict, rather than "it's about the real crimes", it was over. The public might have been able to care about the other crimes, but nobody gives a wet slap about sex today. Starr failed to realize that the age when sex mattered is long gone. The congresscritters read the polls, and knew damn well the voters didn't care, and voted accordingly. Everything from Al Gore lying to defend Bill in January to the debate over impeachment-versus-censure was just filler between the commercials. (But seeing Bubba choke up on the cigar question was fun ;-)
The election mess was amusing to watch - but you only had to read one or two stories a day. What court's ruling, whether it's stacked with Democrats or Republicans, and when it rules. It was only worth watching because the answer would have affected the financial markets, who had bet heavily on a Bush victory - every time a pro-Gore ruling came out, holders of put options made a bundle as the market dropped 100 points in the next minute or two.
Basically, there was a buck to be made on the news conferences in the presidential mess, and the rest was just filler.
That was my Regulon. Cut down OJ to an hour of watching a Bronco, Di to 15 minutes of laughter, Lewinsky to half an hour reading the Starr report and 5 minutes giggling at Bubba on the cigar issue, and the election fiasco to an hour or two a day and some nice trading profits.
What was wrong with your Regulon?
It's not that profound.. Information growth as a biosystem is a weak metaphor. There are no real similarities. Yes in the physical world a population will be regulated by resources, competition, death, birth, etc. The only physical 'regulon' for information is the amount of physical storage media that exists at any given time. It could even be argued that information hasn't grown necessarily.. just that the amount of information you can access personally has. I bet you can't tell me the price of bhat in remote village in Cambodia right now. That information exists but will probably never even make it to any permanent storage record. Yes maybe eventually the amount of stored accessible information will be the sum total of all knowable things in the Universe (minus of course all the stuff we already lost like what was King Tuts favorite song when he was 9) it won't be an Omega... but there won't be some memory spill that takes out reality.. Also information doesn't necessarily grow exponentially anyway.. just because 1 codfish begets 1000000 codfish doesn't mean that 1 bit of information begets anymore information... what's on tv at the tv-guide page, no matter how informative isn't information that is creating more information.. Oh oh some idea hawks are circling my mind, damn dirty regulon.
Media does not breed, does not struggle to remain alive or alter its own environment to increase survival rate. It does not prey, is not hunted and is not subject to the same laws that govern life. Darwin would be embarassed that his theories are being applied to such a ridiculous thing as media.
Media has a limiting factor: us. Media doesn't create itself, we create it. If every single person decided to publish 6 pieces of media each day online that would mean somewhere around 37 billion new pieces of media each day. The real number would be limited to people of a certain age that could actually publish the media and to those who have access to the Internet.
That number can only grow by the same rate as the population becomes of age minus those that die or become otherwise unable to publish any kind of media. For it to grow further, people would have to start publishing more than 6 pieces of media a day. Since there is a limit to how many a person could possibly publish, the number of pieces of media is limited.
Of course, anybody who can think realistically knows that the limiting number is actually far smaller, on the order of maybe a couple of billion new pieces of media each day.
-----
The global economy is a great thing until you feel it locally.
Well, I have degrees in chemistry and biochemistry, and have taken (and passed) a number of graduate-level molecular biology courses. I hope that's close-enough for you.
As a quasi-biologist, here's my advice on the subject: Don't try to apply biological principles to non-biological systems. It doesn't work.
What if I tried to apply computer science principles to biological systems? Sure, to the person who is familiar with neither computer science nor molecular biology, genetically engineering bacteria to perform a desired function may seem like "programming" the bacteria. But the two are so fundamentally different that I would at best end up wasting my time if I tried to apply comp. sci principles in order to get bacteria to do what I wanted them to do. Similarly, if you try to apply biological principles to information, you end up with junk, which is what this Katz article is.
Never take moderation advice from sigs, including this one.
This theory of "exponentiality" seems more than a little alarmist. There's a crucial difference between media and codfish: unlike codfish, media only meaningfully exist insofar as people experience and remember that media. In a straightforward way, *forgetting* is the "Regulon" of media -- who cares if there are a million stories about OJ Simpson if only a fraction of them get read? The web is a prime example of this: most of the billion+ pages out there have had barely any views -- thus effectively "killing" them.
There is no Regulon? Of course there is - people don't back up everything, media tapes get reused, and old tapes fail.
--
--
"I find your lack of faith disturbing." -- Darth Vader
This may be, but to say that "preditors consume most of them" is very wrong for a lot of populations. A culture of microbes in a test tube does not have preditors, yet will become exinct long before they fill the test tube (i.e. "cover the earth"). They will either run out of food or choke on their own waste.
Little stops the ebola virus, for example. They only reason it stops spreading is that it kills everyone in an area and can't transmit into other bodies (i.e. it runs out of "food").
This can be extended to the media, but this is foolish because the media has a very non-biological property: to succeed, it must be seen and/or heard. Thus, media will never be infinite because a) there are a limited number of eyeballs with limited time available to watch media and b) there is not infinite money to fund media which is not viewed.
"The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder"
Replace "length of a film" with "quantity of information" and "bladder" with "brain".
Quite simply, all the baloney gets discarded by the human brain, in the same way a 48-hour movie would be fled by hordes of movie-goers. There is your Regulon. If information is not received by a brain, it does not exist -- it is killed. Thus, physicists and biologists have no use in this debate. It concerns the media people themselves -- and it gives semioticians some research material.
That's the Regulon. Bandwidth is ultimately the gating factor that limits the propagation of information. Bandwidth is neither infinite nor free and that information that makes best and efficient use of bandwidth survives.
Oh my...
-------------
"Concludes Gopnik: "There is No Regulon in the Semiosphere is a wildly abstract way of saying that there is no 'natural predator' to stop the proliferation" of media. They do and will, he suggests, overwhelm the world, and with it reality."
--------------
Concludes Lovejoy: "Bordering on Sensicalessness is Katz's style of condescension with regard to the rest of humanity"
The emperor is nekkid. Just because you _can_ write like this doesn't mean that you should. Someone should take this essay and throw it right in the regulon!
Yes, it's a blog. Sorry if that offends you.
I disagree strongly with people considering music as just information. These "information wants to be free" people do have some validity, but too many people are trying to take it too far, and want to turn everything into "information", so they can get their hands on it without paying or working for it. Music isn't some cosmological constant just discovered. It's not something like the the human genome that has existed and the musician just discovers. Good music is a very personal and developed thing that people spend incredible amounts of time, energy, and talent to create, and I think any musician would argue that their work is more than just "information" pulled out of nowhere. Just because you can turn something into ones and zeros and broadcast it across the internet does not me that it's pure data, free for anyone to do with as they please. I'm not particularly fond of the MPAA and RIAA, or the actions they're taking. I don't like the thought of corporations controlling what we can and cannot experience. But it's important to realize the difference between what is information that should be available to all, and what types of things belong to people and should be respected as their property.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
Daniel C. Dennett has called Darwin's theory of evolution through natural selection a "universal acid." Natural selection is an "algorithmic process," a blind, formal procedure whose operation is guaranteed to return a certain kind of result. A defining property of an algorithmic process is its "substrate neutrality": An algorithm does a job and returns a result whatever the input. Natural selection, as an algorithm, is substrate neutral. One can select between genes on chromosomes, codes in a computer, or ideas in a culture. As long as mutation, replication, and differential survival occur, any substrate can be selected. For instance, ideas can change (mutate), they can spread (replicate), and some can die out while others persist (differential survival), so we would seem to have a substrate suited for selection. It is not clear to me where the problem is.
tell that to my hard drive that just bit the dust
Can this truly be called information overload?
Yes, okay, the report of Di's crash, O.J's stort, etc. at first all qualified as information. Something new was being reported to the public. But it seems to be that the reason htese are examples that are being used is not so much becvause it was an overload of information, but a large regurgitation of small amount of information.
The overload is the number of times one can hear the same information before tuning it all out.
The idea of information of an ecosystem appears to me to be flawed, in the sense that information can't really be consumed like codfish. And even if there was an unlimited amount of information, the impact on the environment is not apparent. The problem is rather a human problem, and a social one. With the increasing amount of information, not only is it impossible for an individual to assimilate it all, he or she can't even scan it all, to see what is worth assimilating and what is not. The social impact in North America is that each individual is separated from the others by the information he or she possesses and the others do not.
While this may appear to be a "bad thing", there are too many examples of nations composed of individuals with relatively limited and congruent data profiles, which wreak bloody havoc on other nations with their own limited (but different) ones.
For this reason, I don't think the information explosion is inherently bad for humans; what is lost in individual certainty is gained in tolerance and openness.
This is article is wrong right out of the gate when it asserts that there is no darwinian evolution in media expansion. 'We', our brains, are the regulon. Sure there is a lot of crap, because the average joe likes crap. Has this guy ever heard of memes? The author of this paper needs to his homework. Hasn't he heard of memetic selection and evolution? These ideas have been around nearly two decades now.
www.enthea.org
In the before-time, when the gods were not yet born and the titans bowed and scraped before the Early Hackers, the arch-demon Information was but a wee imp, nursing at the teat of its foul mother, Technology, who was imprisoned in the Labyrinth of Stupidity, guarded by the great Chimera of the Global Economy. Aeons passed, and the black, evil Information grew into a great beast. The Early Hackers proclaimed, "Information wants to be free!" And so they slayed the great Chimera, and smashed down the walls of the Labyrinth of Stupidity, setting Information loose on the world. Fangs dripping venom, dark wings spread, the great arch-demon Information roamed the land, destroying villages, dispensing death and terror everywhere.
include $sig;
1;
Without contesting Darwinism on the merits, I wonder why the digirati (sorry) feel the need to fit it into _every_ explanation. By shoehorning Darwin into every dialogue, they make him a parody.
Ptolemy's model could be made to explain every aspect of planetary movement, but it was wrong. The communists and creationists say all evidence --and this is important _all evidence_ - points to their worldviews also.
Natural laws have apparent contradictions which cannot be explained by current thinking, and tortured reasoning like Mr. Katz's does not help us understand.
Instead, we should focus on what we do know about information theory rather than trying to cram it into some kind of biological paradigm.
Yes, it's a blog. Sorry if that offends you.
How the heck Katz expects us to take this seriously is beyond me.
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
... but it certainly has its ankle-biters:
http://www.adbusters.org/
http://www.rtmark.com/
Not to mention the Bilboard Liberation Front, The Chuch of Shopping, etc...
Wherever there is even a lone dissenting voice, and a copy machine, there will alwayts be someone or something nipping at "the media's" heels.
This is, of course, assuming you don't think we're stretching the Darwinian argument too thin.
--M.
What is this? This is the second article in the past few days that's basically saying too much information is bad, and that we need some sort of regulation (or [snicker] Regulon). I'll judge information for myself, thank you. Anyone who tries to control the information I can access may be learning about the downside of Darwinian evolution in a hurry.
Is there too much information? Maybe, so what? I'll just find people/organizations I trust, and use them as filters. I'll periodically check up on them to make sure they're honest, and if they're not, I'll go somewhere else.
As for the Omega Point (also known as the Singularity), that's just a model, which may very well not be valid at that point (most models aren't valid when they predict a spike to infinity of some real quantity). Even if it is, why are we afraid of it? It could be a wonderful next step in the evolution of intelligence on this planet.
It's just that as societies and technology grow in complexity, the process of natural selection is abstracted somewhat from the basic "animal fighting to survive in the wild" that we all associate with the term. If our society is struck down by war or disease or whatever, then the old rules will prevail again
Respect for and preservation of the physically and/or mentally handicapped at some cost to society is a side-effect of a society that has grown to sufficiently successful complexity that it can afford to value the well-being of even the weakest of its citizenry. This behaviour is every bit as 'natural' as the scavenger who gets more food than the other who is wounded or diseased.
The lines of cause, effect, reward and such are much more difficult to trace in a complex society. That does NOT mean that the lines do not exist.
**>>BELCH
1) you scare me, Katz! Really!
2) Darwinism applies to LIVING stuff. Information is not living.
3) The promulgation of stories like Lewinski or Princess Die is due to the idiots in the world that suck it up like so much pablum, not due to the informations desire to further itself as a species.
4) You may as well rail against the proliferation of the metric system.. it is just about as dangerous. Acutally, its *more* dangerous (metrics) as the weight of your toolbox has now doubled, and you stand to have more back strain.
The fact of the matter, (imho) is that if information went away tomorrow, you would have a *lot* of confused little sheeples wandering around wonder what to wear for work, because Willard Scott wasnt there to tell them that morning, and a few, proud, group who know how to think for themselves and look outside at that big blue box once in a while and figure out what is going on.
Remember folks, what happens in France or Chile is only important to us because we *know* about it. One thing the Web an electronic information have done, (dangerously) is allow us instant contact with things we care passionately about. How many people are sending around emails about starving children in the Sudan, but wont stop to give a dollar to a local shelter? If anything, it has made us *more* miopic about daily life.
Take for example the email currently going around about Fox broadcasting and BUffy the Vampire Slayer.. if you havent gotten it yet, you will. how many people stop to REALIZE that BUffy is on WB before signing their name and forwarding it on to another dozen unwitting souls? It is this kind of mindless idiocy that is scary, not the information itself. Information is a tool, nothing more.. you can use it for good, you can use it for bad, and you can hit yourself with it.. its up to *you*
I had a point, once.
Maeryk
Feminine Protection? What is that? A chartreuse flame thrower?
I'll save you all a lot of time. You don't have to read the article above.
Summary: "Blah Blah Blah I know big words, down with corporate power, blah blah blah."
You're welcome.
SpamapS -- Undernet #Linuxhelp
The article presents us with a fecund metaphor that no doubt will be used again and again. It's cute when a cultural dynamic can be squashed into the confines of a biological construct. Communication theorists all over must be scrambling to prop up the discipline on something that sounds like _S_cience. The editors of The Journal of Popular Culture might dig this article, though--it has a catchy title and offers a new spin on the 80s penchant for all things semiotic--the "semiosphere!" Woo hoo! We're not just soaking in it, we're BREATHING it! Throw in a little sex and the word, "deconstruction" and hey presto! It's a conference!
There is, however, a distinct absence of the "Off" button--one of the more effective "predators" of information effluvia, not to mention the fact that computers and storage devices still malfunction. People seem to forget about these two "glitches." I think they should be cause for a national holiday.
Ever use a program called 'Babble'? You could feed it multiple text samples, and it'd chop them up and spit out syntactically valid but meaningless babble composed of fragments of the input samples. Feed it a text on evolution, one on media, and a Star Trek episode summary or two, and you've got a JonKatz article! Perfect for an 'alternative' media outlet like /. where it doesn't actually matter if an article doesn't make a damn bit of sense to anyone not using mind-altering substances.
Of course, there are some species that are specific to a particular ecosystem...and they have analogues in information as well. What happens to all the information the FBI or your company or whoever else shreds each year? There isn't a physical copy anywhere else...it has been wiped out...it is extinct.
And I'll even go so far as to assert that there are "keystone species" in information. If you eliminate calculus, you eliminate newtonian mechanics, which in turn destroys our ability to launch satellites, which gets rid of much of our astronomical information, for instance.
Oh yeah...and the other fundamental problem here is information DOES NOT reproduce ITSELF. Saying that information reproduces itself is like claiming that the proliferation of cars indicates some self-sustaining mechanism. People reproduce information just like they do cars. I don't see anyone complaining that there is an overabundance of cars...and some day there will be so many that we won't be able to choose between Honda's and Ford's.
Don't make assumptions. In fact, if Bush and Gore had been the only two candidates, I would have voted for Bush. I find Bush only very slightly less distasteful than Gore, however.
Never take moderation advice from sigs, including this one.
Continued exponential growth can only take place with unlimited resources. In the case of information, it does take resources (not a great deal) to create and distribute. Presumably, the cost of producing and distributing resources will select out the information that is actually productive and valuable. Furthermore, there is already a growing industry of "information selection" where there is a pay-service which weeds out the decent information from the useless. There is a great deal of useless or poorly- presented information out there, and there is more every day, but exponetial growth cannot take place indefinitely and we are likely to see good providers of information flourish and poor providers of information get ignored and eventually wither from lack of resources.
It's psychosomatic. You need a lobotomy. I'll get a saw.
I had a feeling you were going to say that.
Planning to be moderated ± 1: Bad Pun.
In the days of paper-based file storage (like when I started my working life), I was the one who weeded out the weak and useless data. I was only given one or two file cabinets worth of storage space for all my work-related data, and I periodically (usually when I got moved from one desk location to another) weeded the files of stuff I didn't need enough to keep.
Two file cabinets of printed documents equal about
450 MB of text. So the early years of PC's saw the same predator process - My disk filled up with stuff, and I had to decide what to keep and what to throw out.
My current PC at work has 5 of it's 6 GB still free after using it for a year. It's the first machine that has significantly more storage than
I could hold in paper form (the previous machine
had 600MB). And my new home PC has a 40GB disk drive. That's a lot bigger than the 4 GB of paper
books I have at home (and I have a lot of books
at home).
So, suddenly, we have a greatly enlarged resource - data storage. It's growing faster than I'm filling it at the moment. Since there is no extra cost for holding the data on disk (a 1 costs the same to store as a 0), I have no reason to be a ruthless predator and filter out the data I need the least.
Come the time when I'm getting new data so fast that my disks fill up, and I can't afford to keep filling CD-RWs with offline-data, then I'll have to be a predator again and kill files.
Daniel
The article talks about information, exponentiality, and lack of a regulon.
Those all assume that information follows some basic rules of biology;
That information has a survival instinct. This survival instinct would force it to consume as much as it needed to reproduce, and reproduce as often as it is wont to do.
Information has no survival instinct. It is itself a consumable with very little cost. A better analogy to information is money; the value of the information is much higher than the value of the basic structure, bits or whatnot, that describe the information. In money, the denomination is higher value than that of the paper itself. That, and the potential for near limitless reproduction.
What limits money? Real value. Money needs to be assigned to something, like a car, or an apple, or a service, before it can be worth something. It is only useful insofar as it can be used. Information is similar. It's limiting factor should be the value that information is associated with it, whether it be an emotional state, a memory, a belief, or a set of instructions.
Media *only* replicates at exponential rates because there is value, and in a networked world, it will replicate as often as it's value will allow it.
The worth of a song, an image, a movie, a book, etc, determines how many copies are sold, spread, or shared. Rather than tagging it with a denomination (all CDs are about $10 in the US, or DVDs are $30, PSX games are $40, etc) the value is expressed in units produced; 1 million $10 CDs, 4 million $30 DVDs, or 5 million $40 PSX discs.
If one really wants to force an analogy to evolution, the value of the movie Unbreakable, to society, as a message about hope, or self worth, or strength, or whatever analysis you want to assign, is determined by the number of copies of the DVD, VHS, and VCDs that exist. A half million years from now, physical processes kick in, and the chance that any copy of it exists, statistically, is determined by how many copies of it exist today, in a strange quantum/statistical/radioactive half-life kind of way.
Today, how many copies of how many Greek tragedies exist? How about 1000 years from now? How many copies of the Matrix, or Unbreakable, or Crouching Tiger, exist?
Ah, if someone else wants to pursue a better analogy, information can be deconstructed to something like DNA, which by itself is fairly pointless, but within the construct of a self replicating organism, starts to become valuable, as it helps determine the survival and growth potential of the organism.
Likewise, media, information, and such are like DNA, and the value is more analogous to how well the instructions, morals, and stories help the society and culture to grow, adapt, survive, and evolve!
Say, the Anarchist's Cookbook, as a negative example!
Geek dating!
GPL Deconstructed
The premise here is fairly absurd. You're comparing the properties and characteristics of things that are material and tangible with things that are not. Over-population, over-proliferation of biological life does not map directly (or even similarly) to the over-proliferation of information. The characteristics that make over-population bad, such as exhaustion of resources, spatial constraints, etc, just do not apply to electrical impulses on a wire!
Indeed, the premise is antithetical to Metcalfe's Law: The usefulness of a network equals the square of the number of its connections. In other words, exponentiality, where information is concerned, is the key to ultimate utility.
--jordan
Accepts the premise that information spreads and grows like an organism, when it is probably more apt to ascribe properties of genes and DNA to information.
Movies, stories, news, music, etc, help to shape, teach, grow, and limit our cultures, and the value of good information is that it is absorbed by and propogated through our culture, through space *and* time. There is no regulon in this case, in the sense of a predator, but obsolescence, time, and apathy work on the information to destroy it.
Geek dating!
GPL Deconstructed
No Regulons? what about disk space?? And bandwidth for that matter. Were it actually true that there were no regulons, the first information re-arranger Bot out-there would make the amount of information explode to infinity. I had read an interesting on this topic once, Data Smog , from David Shenk. Check it out. (Sorry for linking pointing to the bookstore, it was actually the first place I thought I could find the book on the web.)
-><- no
Natural selection applies to anything in which competition, growth, and adaptation applies, assuming there is a feedback mechanism to which all the above three forces can modify something.
So websites can be 'selected' against, genres of music, or movies; but individual CDs, movies, or stories themselves cannot be.
There is an interesting analogy I thought of, in which information == DNA, and a culture, a person, or a society is the organism that uses said information. Instead of survival based on physical traits, it is survival based on behavioral traits.
The story of Skywalker, or the Mau'dib, or of Cloud Strife, affects the people who partake, and affects their behavior, and thus their chances at success, happiness, and reproduction.
But the information itself does not change, excepting in the concept of sequels, variations, etc, and that's more mutation in the fact that as an author takes in a story, his interpretations change the story subtly as he reproduces it and retransmits it.
Geek dating!
GPL Deconstructed
Though I'm not sure the term regulon has much meaning in this context, as time applies to biological entities without being considered a predator; old age, and all...
Geek dating!
GPL Deconstructed
All your points are valid, concerning information, but they aren't regulons, I don't think.
They aren't predators, in the sense that they grow and thrive off the death of information!
Geek dating!
GPL Deconstructed
for some reason, reading through this, I can't help but feel like i'm in the middle of cryptonomicon, listening to crap like 'who will control the onramps to the information superhighway'... time to hide back in my beard.
---
I'm not ashamed. It's the computer age, nerds are in.
They're still in, aren't they?
---
I'm not ashamed. It's the computer age, nerds are in.
They're still in, aren't they?
There is no medium that lasts for ever.
The earliest such as stone engravings last the
longest, but even their languages are forgetton.
Only the good stuff preserved by copying and
translation (and much lost too). Only the
important books have been copied, since most of
the originals have been lost.
Modern media is more transient. Magnetic storage
lasts a decade, assuming its "language" or
encoding protocol lasts even that long. Web media
and video are even more transient. Again
preservation by copying is what lasts.
A predator eats, consumes, and thrives on prey.
Interest and apathy are good regulators, but aren't in the same class as regulons, I don't think.
Information can spread more easily, but don't reproduce in the same way in which regulons, prey, and predators, are associated.
A moral, however, for example, can be forced into the concept. Take Wes Craven, who mutates some common morals into his horror movies. It is the person who consumes ideas, and then reproduces it in a modern format for others to consume; maybe later, some of those people will be inspired by Wes Craven, and become an author of horror stories, etc.
The ideas themselves aren't like prey or predators, but are like DNA, and shape or form the people who incorporate the stories into themselves, and shape the ideas or stories that these people later spit back out for the culture to share and consume.
Geek dating!
GPL Deconstructed
...scientists and researchers have created a robot to guide the evolution of information. They have named this robot Regulon. Regulon will be responsible for removing all of the weak and sick little information from the information gene pool. The designers of Regulon say that he is quite the efficient information predator.
This just in...
Regulon has removed the code which he runs on from the information gene pool. He was able to continue operation from memory (RAM) until a reboot was necessary. Unfortunately, he was running Windows95, so that did not last very long. Designers said that it was a fundamental design flaw that caused the problem. One of the designers was quoted as saying, "Maybe, we should not try to regulate information."
this is a left handed sig
"Click!"
668: Neighbour of the Beast
-Regulon? My Remote Control is a regulon.
/. so I read it.
-The bottom line is anything I don't want to see I don't. For instance I'd normally not see this thread b/c I think Jon Katz is a dope. But it was a slow day here and at
-I will continue to not see Jon Katz articles. They have no life starting... Now.
This
DING DING DING
Information is Fire
This
Leaving aside the fact that this article reads like bad science fiction, I'm wondering how I managed to miss the Cone of Silence while spending a month in Paris. Is it powered by the Eiffel tower, throwing out beams of protection from the onslaught of television and email? Were the Parisians who kept me up night after night debating world events and culture perhaps part of some underground network that drilled holes in the shield to reach the American media?
But then, I look out of the window of the office and see a vast tract of woods, perhaps there is an escape for us Americans as well...
Kathryn AegisIf a tree falls in the woods, does anybody hear it.. I suppose the internet is just life support for the passing sound.... the problem with this article is, until AI is a reality, information is only such when people absorb it. I guess in this regard, we should distinguish "potential information" from "kinetic information", but enough of this philosophical waxing, this thread reeks of MCM
At least in the US, media outlets are for the most part for-profit entities. If their work generates ample profit, they will continue performing that work. There is apparently a lucrative market for this information out there. Just because you're not a part of it doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
The 'Regulon' of the media is the pocketbook. When they can't rent eyeballs or eardrums, or sell dead trees or plastic, they will wither like the casualties of an overused food source. I can only hope that paid propaganda will be anathema enough for journalists to profitably expose.
The real questions are: will all this media in its different forms and competencies make for a better-informed citizenry? Will the depressed cost of information provide a wealth of knowledge to the less affluent? Are media consumers discriminating in their intake of information, or are they easily-swayed sheep?
There was a stand-up comic recently on TV talking about how he watched TV news by flipping between several networks, and synthesizing the total news (where some networks emphasized one story that another might virtually ignore) picture. He was making a joke, of course, but the underlying concept is still sound. In order to mitigate the effects of journalistic bias, you need to view the same media thru different outlets, personalities, etc. to get a well rounded picture. Or, you need to be aware of a medium's personal biases and use them to filter out relevant information.
Your Working Boy,
Actually over time the separated populations would begin to evolve into seperate species unless the cod fish depended on another spieces to survive. In that case the Cod Fish would have died out before conquering the world since their food source or symbiotes would have died too or could not exist in every ecosystem on earth.
I think that Lemming (the real animal) should be talked about first however. Lemmings have population booms every so often. When this occurs the Lemmings to proceed all of the vegitation in the tundra focing them to move as one entity searching for food until they reach the ocean or another large body of water. At this point the Lemmings will follow one another to a watery grave. This cycle goes on continually, mass suicide. Creepy huh?.
Anyway, my point is that you can't assume an ecosystem will not develop its own predators when the predator could even be itself. Every system is finite (except for the universe which is defined as infinite) thus eventually the Regulon run out of 'cyber-eco-space' (can't think of a better word).
In concrete terms, Information needs to physically stored on harddisc, cd-rom, memory or anyother future technology. Thus the physical world's storage devices must grow at the same rate as the amount of information that exists for the Regulon to grow. This is impossible, thus the Regulon will constrain itself thru evolution into multiple species like the cod fish would, or naturally kill off itself searching for resources like the lemming.
...sounds to me like something out of Star Trek, or an old, bad sci-fi movie.
"Approaching Regulon Five, captain...."
---
Good judgment comes from experience.
Experience comes from bad judgment.
I've been taught by my yoga teacher that many peoples nervous systems will fail under the burden of information and that in order to sucessfully navigate the sea of information it is necessary to develop the meditative mind.
:-) (that's rough but work with me people).
There's a great article about the use of mantra to fortify the mind.
I practice Kundalini yoga to strengthen my nervous system, increase the oxygen carrying capacity of the blood, and balance out my glandular secretions. Meditation is kind of like defraging the hard disk . . . and scanning the surface for errors while flushing all caches
Listen to Reality!
1) If you are going to compare information with ecosystems, you need to understand information is a meme, not an animal. Genes operate at a completely different level then the animals we know and love and eat for dinner. In your own genetic code there is an enormous amount of muck -genetic information that will never be used by your ecosystem, i.e. your body and all its parts. Remember the wierd-ass stories you've read about children born with lasting vestigal tales? Well, they happen because some freakish act of nature turns on a gene that never should have been used.
Memes, like genes, pick up enormous amounts of junk that do not necessarily stop them from successfully replicating. Only at macroscopic levels, where competition is much more intense, does the more meaningless genetic info fall by the wayside. Same thing with memes. But for memes, the macroscopic level would be, oh I don't know, Christianity. A concept of enormous force that has been around for a while and will remain for even longer. Think about how much crap has been written about Christianity, but how few but essential ideas are needed to understand the concept. Christianity is a memetic animal, not some tofu recipe that is just a simple meme.
2) Genes must replicate through a medium other than itself. Same thing with memes. The human genome is amazing large and complex because we as a species can store all that info without a problem, plus room to spare. This is why fruitflys have smaller genomes. Same thing with memes. Information will continue to replicate as long as humans can remember one more piece of worthless information. Or if they can't remember it, store it on there hard drive.
3) So if you understand all that crap above, you can see the rules start falling into place.
Memes can be worthless and still replicate without harming the ecosystem.
Memes must replicate through a medium whose size and nature determine the speed and amount of replication.
You, no matter who you are, cannot only take in so much info in one day. And a lot of that info is sensory stuff that never gets processed anyway. So you set the natural limit of what gets replicated. Those annoying ads everywhere? Well, people can deal with most of them and those that get too annoying tend to disappear. Think of the current pop-up window trend to advertise - that will last about 6 months because the information can be so easily turned off and most consumers - i.e. the medium - don't like them and won't except them.
4) All this bullshit reasoning is really to show that information follows rules just like everything else and like most genetic information if bound by how much importance we give it and competition among itself. The reason that there are no predators is because predator don't really exist at the genetic level - the bounds are define by the rules above. The only real question is how to keep the amount of junk info in your head to a small enough amount that you have room for important stuff. All the rest is equations for biology class.
Wow...also for innovative (and never biased or untrue) programming such as "FOX When Cops Beat Innocent Bystanders", "FOX Crappy Magic", and "FOX When Buildings Fall Down". Fox has a lot of great shows and a lot of crap...and most of it (great and crap) is bunk. I love the Simpsons, but I recognize them as FOX programming. For a few seconds a day, I'm entertained by FOX News (just like the Jerry Springer show), but I recognize it for what it is. You can hardly call it independant news. It is Rupert Murdock's finest achievement, I'm sure. :)
Look, information is fundamentally different from material systems: I can make perfect duplicates at will of information.
Applying concepts of Darwinian selection to a theoretical population of memes? Well, considering the nature of memes, wouldn't that make US the selection criteria? "I don't like that, so I'll ignore it." And eventually, due to bit rot, it goes away.
But it's BOGUS. At it's very core. I just don't think we've reached the saturation point yet with all of our various forms of media. And reaching saturation is okay, too.
There is no threat from this. I LIKE having more sources of information, because it gives me more choices. "But the quality is decreasing!" And it will continue to do so. But the greater number of information choices does mean, long term, that there are a greater number of above-average quality sources than there was before. Yes, I'll have to go diggging through a greater mountain of shit to find them.
"Avast! Prepare for the rodgering!" THWACK! "Arrr.. me nards.."
How about Google? How about just common sense? Sure there is a lot of information, but there is also a lot of grass, a lot of gas & a lot of silly people. PEOPLE are the predators of rampant information.
That said- why did Katz, who is familiar with television, miss this potentially embarrassing detail?
There's your 'regulon', right there.
Not only that, I can _demonstrate_ the Regulon. Watch closely:
_Effusive_ apologies for carrying on like that, but notice what just happened? A whole bunch of people totally ignored the hype. Just as a whole bunch of people now ignore politics and won't vote, etc. When you are drowning in information you really lose interest in selecting among it, and you begin to reject _all_ of it simply because too much of it is unsuitable or inappropriate...
I post to a musician web board, and a common topic has been, "Ack, get a load of these clowns email spamming all of us to get downloaded!" This gets great contempt. Well, just recently everyone got spammed by a _new_ twist- a person sending 'a fan has sent you an email!' mail, who expressed great appreciation, said they downloaded all your songs and if you check it turns out they _did_, and asks only, "Will you put me on your band's mailing list so I can be informed when new material comes out?"
The consensus was: it was a very determined attempt to harvest addresses- which would then be spammed to hell. Many people got this treatment, and some of them had bought in to similar approaches and ended up getting spammed like mad from bands they had not even heard of.
So at this point in this musician community, the 'fan has sent you an email' mechanism (operated from a web page) has become utterly worthless because there is no perceptible difference between a genuine fan and attempts to harvest emails. You can't even go by 'does the mail display someone else's URL or is it just a letter' because it can be seemingly a totally sincere letter and _still_ be a baited hook!
That situation would seemingly be immune to 'regulons' and yet in practice the mechanism can end up ignored due to abuses.
I've said before that we're looking at an economy of _attention_, and this is precisely the regulating factor. Much advertising, not to mention web advertising, is useless- some actually un-sells products by being too annoying (this can be measured...) and the more advertising screams for attention the less it's noticed.
Know who Victor Kiam is? You've probably seen his face. People recognise him on the street because he is the guy who 'liked the shaver so much, he bought the company'. He sells electric razors in those advertisements.
Quick- what is the brand name of razor he's selling? People recognise this guy's face on the street and remember the 'I bought the company' tagline. When he then asks them what is the name of the company, more than half of the people don't know.
Quick, what sport is Michael Jordan known for? You'll find many people recognise the name but haven't a clue what the guy does.
Regulon, meet Katz. Katz, meet Regulon. ...but you already know each other, don't you? Because Regulon has been causing people to tune _you_ out, Katz, for years. Just as it does to _everybody_.
I know, I prolly spelled the subject wrong, shoot someone else.
anyway, I tend to see that intelligence is being bred into our society. Like tends to seek like, we want to be in relationships with people who are mentally stimulating to ourselves.
Granted, over time there will be a higher population of quickly reproducing unintelligent masses. However, in balance to this there are now, have always been, and will always be those people descended from people who think. People who do not want to, and will not tolerate, being married to a person who is incapable of sharing in phylosophical discussions with them. (Defining phylosophy as a the usual meandering part logic part fact part imagination conversations that tend to occur here and elsewhere... i.e. this bit).
I'm going to go off and find someone to procreate with, any intelligent barbi dolls in Chicago area may apply. heh heh. -GiH
With the large amounts of input available, it's tempting to just feed at the trough of information and become a being of pure stimulus - in other words, a consumer. Though media has, in its forms, dominated the social life of humans down the millenia, it seems that the situation is approaching oversaturation.
It seems then that humanity should, in information-rich societies, be intellectually moving towards the being known as "mentats" in the Dune series - people who can absorb vast amounts of information, distill it, and constantly reconfigure their internal model of the information in realtime. These people then become, for all intents and purposes, filters for sponsors and/or patrons.
In reality, this is the basis behind the management of businsses and/or people: one person is responsible for the division, subordinates, keeping up with the field, competition, etc, and should be a vast repository of knowledge about the specified domain for their superiors. In business, everyone knows (or should know) that the quality of your management team = the quality of your company. In information-rich societies, the quality of your mentats will reflect the quality of your company. Who can obtain and plow through vast fields of information will be dominant; who can analyze the consumer and discover what they really want will be dominant.
For consumers, the picture is either bleak or exhilarating depending on the perspective. Exhilarating, because corporations will serve your every need without you even knowing necessarily that you had that need, bleak because, with all needs satisfied continuously progress will stop.
Interesting, thou.
--- only for the squeamish
We don't need help from physicists, we need help from pharmacists, because you need to up your dosage a bit.
Information threatens to overwhelm reality. Thats rich.
--
--
You sure got a purty mouth...
Thank dog he decided to move to France. We now have one less writer to contribute to our overflowing information cup! Oh, but he is still adding useless information to our system through the internet, even from France. Is there no hope. Maybe we should pass a law banning useless information from France or just cut them off completely..
Monica Lewinski... OJ Simpson... Whitewater... and on and on and on...
:)
Point of order! A few stations tried to stop covering OJ when things were out of hand. And what happened? Their ratings dropped like a rock. If anything, it's not the media outlets or information that's out of control. Aside from the point brought up by others that information and media are not biological entities, the root cause is ourselves.
Stings a little doesn't it? Knowing that we are all part of the problem.
Don't want to hear about cum stains on some blue dress over and over again? You have to stop watching it! The fact that it stays on means that you or others around you are watching those "news" stories and buying the products advertised during the commercials no matter have stale or sensational the content may be.
Want to stick it to the media outlets? Grab everyone you know that is fixated on some inane news item and force them to go out and watch "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" or start a book club or go outside and throw a frisbee or have an orgy or ANYTHING OTHER THAN WATCHING THE REGURGITATED NEWS STORIES!!!
Now pardon me, I have to go watch and see who GWB is trying to appoint and who's opposed to it.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
There's more information in the universe than elementary particles (whatever they might be). For every string there is a vibration and a vector through space and something through time, and how it is organized with its neighbors, and how the neighborhoods are organized into bigger things and don't forget the particles' opinions on the state of the universe. We are only just begining to think about scratching the surface of all this vastness of information.
And I, for one, will not be content until I have it all.
Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation
Information is not Knowledge
There's an age old truth in writing.
If you can't say it in plain english then you really don't know what you are talking about.
I learned this from my parents. The authors of over 50 books and uncounted hundreds of magazine articles. (They also taught professional writing at the UW-Madison extension for many years.)
Freenet has this sort of thing built in. The less objects are accessed, the more nodes they drop off of. Eventually, if no one is interested in it, the file drops off Freenet, never to be seen again, much like the Passenger Pigeon or the other extinct thing that I can't think of right now.
$ wc -w katzarticle
:-)
1262 ktz
It seems you're not doing your part to stem the tide, Jon. Shame shame.
--
There is no K5 cabal.
There is no K5 cabal.
I am not the real rusty.
I would disagree with this article. Perhaps information does exist in the mind in the way Katz describes, as a type of codfish trying to survive. However, it does have competition, mainly from the prior knowledge and experiences a person has. This can be the basis for a regulon. When I was reading the political propoganda of the last election, did I believe everything one candidate said about another? NO, because it is my past experience that there is significant bias in those statements. For the same reason, I don't find myself going to Slate or MSNBC too much, because I'm pretty sure what I'll find there, and my regulon's get tired of dealing with the crap.
Perhaps Katz has a point in that an uninformed, impressionable reader could take in two peices of completely opposite information presented in the same fashion and not know how to deal with it. However, you can't have an "official" truth, that would be too easy to manipulate to fool the masses. The power of the internet is that you can find anything on anything. True, the boundless amount of information is both a strength and a weakness. However, the "sanitized" version this article seems to point to has much resemblence to mediums such as television, which have been very well compromised and controlled.
If you're really bothered by the vomit that some of the larger information companies have began spewing these days, stop paying attention to it. Turn off your TV, and tell others to do the same. Be a culture jammer. Do something.
If I could think of something pithy to say, I'd put it here. No really.
in universal terms, anyway, you'll find that unless we get off this planet in a meaningful way, which I find not really likely, you'll find a sharp drop in that exponential curve back to zero when our Sun eats this planet. All that info, the buggy code someone you know wrote last year, and that broken umbrella will all be truly recycled in the biggest reset button to hit near you.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
God said it in the Bible 3000 years ago; I guess he scooped Katz.
This is a nice, somewhat useful, and *limited* metaphor.
Ideas do not evolve on their own, we evolve them. They don't reproduce - that would be us again.
Okay.. there are certain directions that one can explore with the analogy between the proliferation of a species and the proliferation of information, but some one has already dutifully pointed out that information dies when we cannot consume it. Either it dies for us individually or for the population as a whole as it becomes unuseful and unwanted. Another point that might have been made in the articles below my threshold is that information is part of the contemporary environment. Our ability to process information is our determinate of success (actually, information processing has been a determinate for success for our species and all species for as long as life has had senses, but I am speaking specifically of data/media/modern infomation). Darwinism says that the strong survive and in contemporary society one strength is to be able to parse and make sense of all the information that is available and then put it to use. These people succeed according to the general values of our society. The threshold system of ranking messages is a prime example of such information parsing. Someone is out there deciding whether what I am saying right now is worth hearing.. I don't think the proliferation of information should be the concern of our society, but we should probably worry more about how to decide what information we need or want. All the crap becomes irrelevant at that point. -Brent +~+~+~ interi.yi.org just because
-b
brain.
We're building a god, but we're building a god with the flaws and the
gifts of everyone on the planet almost, at this rate -- millions of people -- with no real unified agenda and no real dialogue about
what the psychic and neurological and social and economic effect really will be of that acceleration and separation of this larger brain."
Read every throbbing gristle of the Genesis P-Orridge interview here.
SEO Copywriter. Just Say ON
Ideas do not replicate themselves. Therefore Dawkins cannot make an evolutionary argument.
It's a cute idea. But completely illogical. At the least, it's not an evolutionary argument.
Right now we pay for: * Food * Shelter * Water * Security (to some degree or the other) If the theory of Mematics are correct: Human intellegence's primary function is to replicate memes (kind of like a mini-idea). Media allows mass reproduction of memes. Media fills your need to get more memes (like this one). Why not charge utility rates for a flow of memes?
-- $G
Vocalizations + (ears,mouth(brain))
Alphabets + (eyes,hands(brain)) came laterCaptain! The Regulons are invading the Semiosphere!
Photon tubes loaded, permission to fire?