“We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.”
Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Glaser, p. 75
We hold one assumption so deeply that we rarely state it: that understanding is a function of supply. More facts, more reporting, more voices, more access and comprehension follows. Every remedy we propose for public confusion runs on it. People are misinformed, so fund journalism. People are unheard, so build more channels. The diagnosis changes; the prescription is always more.
Jean Baudrillard’s suggestion, made four decades before the feed, is that past a certain density this stops working and then starts working in reverse.
Three things we tend to confuse
It helps to separate what usually travels as one idea.
Information is what arrives: facts, images, headlines, figures, notifications. Communication is the transmission of those things between people. Meaning is something else entirely something understood, interpreted, weighed against what you already know, and absorbed into how you see the world.
The first two have scaled almost without limit. The third depends on attention and time, neither of which scales at all.
The reversal
Baudrillard works through three possible relationships between information and meaning.
The first is the conventional one: information produces meaning, and where meaning is thin the answer is more information. He observes that we have run this experiment at enormous scale and the meaning has not appeared.
The second is that they are simply unrelated that information is a technical operation of a different order, the way a machine can move millions of records without any of it signifying anything. Closer, but too comfortable.
The third is his actual claim, and it is the difficult one: information doesn’t merely fail to produce meaning. It actively consumes it.
Consider what happens now when something occurs. Reports, then banners, then footage, then posts, then experts, then counter-experts, then memes, then polls, then commentary on the polls, then fact-checks, then arguments about the fact-checks, then an algorithm recommending reactions to the reactions. We assume this leaves us better informed about the event. It is worth asking whether the event is still visible underneath the machinery assembled to discuss it.
What implodes
We picture the collapse of meaning as fragmentation one thing scattering into many. Baudrillard means the opposite motion. Not explosion outward but collapse inward, distinctions folding into each other until you can no longer say where one ends:
- Event and its representation
- Reality and image
- Information and entertainment
- Audience and participant
- Message and medium
- Producer and consumer
Each of those was once a real boundary. Each is now difficult to locate.
Communication as performance
This is the part I find most useful, and the most uncomfortable.
Media increasingly stage communication rather than produce it. Call in and tell us what you think. Join the conversation. React. Comment below. Vote now. Share your story. Every one of these says the same thing: communication is happening, and you are part of it.
The activity is real. Whether it constitutes communication is a separate question, and the system has no way of distinguishing them because from inside, the evidence looks identical.
Think of a couple in a failing marriage who go to therapy, read books about communication, analyse their communication styles, text each other about their communication problems, and debrief on whether the last conversation was productive. There is an extraordinary volume of communication about communication. They may understand each other less than when they started.
The performance of a thing can crowd out the thing.
Information eats its own subject
You watch a hundred stories today. Tomorrow a hundred more arrive and today’s vanish not because anything was resolved, but because they were displaced. The machinery requires novelty the way an engine requires fuel. So information does something strange to events: it doesn’t preserve them, it metabolises them.
“Information devours its own content.”
Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Glaser, p. 76
Meaning needs duration. Information rewards speed. That conflict doesn’t resolve; one side simply wins.
This is why a politician’s forty-five-minute speech reaches almost nobody as a forty-five-minute speech. It reaches people as a twenty-second clip, a headline, a meme, a commentator explaining the clip, another commentator attacking the first, polling on the reactions, an edit of the edit. At some point the media-event becomes larger and socially more consequential than whatever actually happened. The representation stops pointing at reality and starts standing in for it.
The form beats the content
Marshall McLuhan’s line, that the medium is the message, holds that the shape of a channel changes society more than anything passing through it. Baudrillard pushes this to an uncomfortable place.