1. It's all information

In 1949, C. E. Shannon and W. Weaver developed the basic information theory, which
was a mathimatical aproach to looking at comunication. The implications of such a 
theory are far-reaching. To reduce the theory to bare-bones, there is always a 
transmitter and receiver, as well as a source, and some degree of interference, or 
noise. Shannon and Weaver also had a final destination. For a more thorough summary, 
check out a site on information theory For my purposes, I will simplify 
things a little more. At a less physical level, there is "sender" and "receiver". In most cases, 
several "transmissions" occur, but each one has to made up of these two poles. Noise is a 
tougher question. What, after all, is being sent? If I am looking at the world, I have no way of 
knowing if I am seeing it in the way it "intended" to be seen. What is "intended?" If everyone 
has a slightly different set of eyes and brain, then no two people see things exactly the same. 
While we could call this "noise", I would prefer to see it as different reception handling. It's 
not distortion of the sender's side, and nor is distortion somewhere in between.

As people, we are bound to two functions, send and receive. We can try to
verify information through other people's experiences, but there is nothing to say that one set 
of input is any more "tangible" or "solid" than any other; tangability is merely another 
sensation, another kind of information.

When my brother was in college, he had a friend who was studying mathimatics. When he 
learned that my brother was studying sciences, he said he was wasting his time. "It's all 
information," he would say. But math is the system, the grand engine, the pure symbolic 
language, while science...just knowledge. This fellow enjoyed just  flipping through physics 
textbooks, because he found the equasions beautiful; to see what math looked like when 
"applied". Beautiful yet totally transient and meaningless, since once something is formulated, 
and ceases to be abstract, it dies.

2. Fake food
We have all had something like a tofu hotdog before. I have had tofu many times, and it actually 
is a real food, not just something that can be used to immitate meat. The  problem is, when I 
am expecting a hot dog, a tofu dog tastes terrible.

It would be easy to jump to the conclusion that all immitation is enherently bad, and  to 
privilige hot dogs, simply because they are the "original", even if they are the  innards scraped 
out of the bottom of the meat dicing vat. The problem is, hot dogs arn't orignal anyways. At one 
point, they were German Knockworst, or something like that,  which us Americans simplified 
and destributed at ballparks, thus homoginizing and selling out the delicasy that is German 
cuesine. Well maybe.
	
The fine line is of alteration versus deception. Faking a great food is often a bad idea; the Zen 
American hotdog should never be faked. However, foods are constantly being 
altered in subtle ways, such as the modern microwaved exploding hotdog. The exloding
hotdog is hardly an fake, it is quite a thing unto itself, and, truthfully, hardly 
resembles the original. Tofu dogs, on the other hand, are really insidious, because they are so 
often passed off as equivilent (if not actually better, because you don't need to kill any Tofu 
animals in order to eat them, or so goes the claim.)

In other words, while it's hard to pinpoint something as more "true" than something else, it's 
clear that alterations, whether improvements or not, are on morally higher ground that 
deceptive fakes. Just ripping something off is fine; that's what we did to the Germans, but 
making something that is quite different and calling it by the same name is really wrong. What 
am I talking about? There is nothing wrong with virtuality, or even alteration of reality, just 
as long as it's not called the same as the original --reality2 or real-n would be more accurate. 
Why try to similate? Why try for virtual? Why just be other?

The problem arises when people try to pass off the immitation as the original. This is 
deception and cheapens the quality of life. If news programs alter footage to make things more 
exciting, and they claim it's what their cameras really recorded, it is time to start killing 
news people. But if they started claiming "our news that's better than real life! Who needs fact! 
Watch us instead!" I would probably watch the news religiously.

3. Information Structures
If the individual's conception of reality is based on personal experience and genetic disposition,
it follows that a similar thing is true for the larger social unit. In other words, the behavior of 
a social unit is based largerly on the information it receives; although it may do rather 
arbitrary things with this knowledge. Because the individual's behavior is affected strongly by 
the information she receives, one of the easiest ways for a society to protect itself is to
a) control the information the individual receives
b) make sure that the opinions and beliefs of the decisionmakers are insulated from the 
individuals

If political lobbies control what the candidate can and can't discuss (don't want to offend the 
moneybags), then we don't here about what's really going on, and arn't part of the real 
discussion. We are insulated from the process, if only by the information system that is set up. 
A brief look at newspapers will reveal that the process is highly filtered, and the architecture 
really doesn't promote discussion. Consider that newspapers, compaired to the TV, are fairly 
benign. I am right. My argument is flawless. Join the revolution.










In progress....