Now for something that makes more sense after a few fizzes, Virilo's "Art of the Motor"
Virilio, the French born seventy-six year old gentleman, known for his extensive writings on technology is especially popular in the new media circle. Yet despite his brilliance, along with Mcluhan, I cannot read anything nor interpret without a couple cocktails in me and some early Ramones. Ian Swinley works as well....networks, the possibility of reconditioning it by a virtual, fundamentally cybernetic environment became a reality. As a result, the incredible opportunity even arose of adding an extra, though simulated, dimension to the normal dimensions of human activity: computer- generated CYBERSPACE thereafter introducing a "fractional" dimension alongside the "whole" dimensions of our customary milieu.
But another aspect of this theoretical mutation deserves our attention: information's energetic side. Immediately after the war, you will recall, MATTER, until then considered in terms of MASS and ENERGY, was rounded off by the addition of the notion of INFORMATION. But, as relativity teaches, if the usual notions of mass and energy are distinct but equivalent--E= mc2--we then had to try to capture the relationship between information and energy.
From the 1950s onward, then, it became a question of assimilating "information" with "energy," a form of energy as yet unknown in physics. After latent (potential) energy and actual (kinetic) energy, the possibility of data (cybernetic) energy arose. Initially, with management data processing, it was the economic aspect of energy that prevailed as a key factor in industrial production. But with the subsequent emergence of computerized simulation and the boom in telecommunications, evidently promoting TELEACTTON, information comes to the fore as an entirely separate form of energy: sound and image energy, the energy of long- distance touch and contact. By saving on physical displacement, teleoperator technology suddenly looked like a serious rival to transport energy. The implementation of absolute speed in signal transmission eliminated the relative speed of the circulation of products, goods, and people, enabling huge strides in automatic traffic regulation due to various servocontrol processes. Information suddenly looked like the same thing as its limit speed.
Cats, I gotta get up, Ante-Meridian.