The information circus is my way of mapping an understanding of how the basic elements of our daily existence in language created spaces behave and how they are related to one another. Schematically: A lot of the problems with “news” aka “social media” are happening along the Phenomena -> Data -> Information path. It used to be very expensive to make Phenomena into Data, so we thought Information was really valuable, which turns out to not necessarily be the case.

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In a stunning act of national unity, the people of the United States seem to be realizing, all at once, that what everybody had previously thought was “The News” was in actual fact “Social Media” the whole time! The thing that made it look different, back then, is that the “social” part of “social media” was made up of powerful upper class information entities, either businesses or people, who were the media—or more correctly, who were the message—but now the social part is made up of everybody (anybody) who can understand the channel, and who, it is increasingly apparent, are not necessarily guaranteed to be the channel owners.

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Having the work surface presented as a continuous space in which one interacts with its contents using any device—rather than interacting with content in device-specific sub-spaces or fractional replicants of the work surface—is subtle and brilliant. This continuous space is what Apple services is really selling, devices are just the access dongles to get at it even more creative blue sky. :-)

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