Fundamental Principles of Rational Media

In my previous post, I noted that my concept of rationality differs from the general, widely accepted views of this notion. I do not disagree with these views. Instead, I believe the way I view rationality is more generalized.

To put it simply: Rationality can be interpreted as any idea – in other words: any idea can be considered rational – if it can be expressed in language. What language is / isn’t – that’s perhaps a more difficult question to answer, but as mathematics is one such language… and as logic, i.e. „mathematical logic“ can be interpreted as a subset of mathematics, logic can also be interpreted as a language.

Most so-called „programming“ languages are also, well: languages. „Natural“ languages are also languages (indeed: the distinction between „natural“ language and „artificial“ language is really not very distinct, clear, obvious or anything like that). And as I mentioned in my previous post, even facial expressions, scents, DNA and many other things can also be interpreted as language.

In the context of „rational media“, however, I suggest limiting the meaning of the expression to what is often referred to as „machine readable“ language. I would even suggest limiting the extent of „rational media“ more than that, because there are actually many types of machine-readable expressions which are usually considered to be unintelligible by humans without machines. For example: Hollerith cards, magnetic tape and discs, compact discs, usb sticks, bar codes and QR-codes to name just a few. There are also some expressions which are simply difficult to express in the traditional notion of natural language – for example: numerical values written in hexadecimal formats.

All of this is by and large simple and straightforward in an online setting, because web addresses are almost all written using what most people consider to be natural language expressions (though note that so-called „international domain names“ / IDNs are written in a code which allows for algorithmic translation between the latin character set used in all domain names to transformed expressions in specialized character sets [and vice versa] ). In general, surfing the web is very much like using an encyclopedia, a lexicon or what used to be called a „card catalog“. The primary difference is that whereas the web is considered to be distributed, the traditional forms were usually viewed as created by a single author, organization or institution. Therefore, whereas for many decades and even centuries people had become very accustomed to indexes being something created by specialized „indexers“ or „indexing services“, today the „index“ to the web is considered to be integrated into the web itself (note, however, that the registries of „top level domains“ [TLDs] are actually sort of like the „indexes of last resort“ … that is, „last resort“ excluding ICANN).

I will simply abruptly stop here for now – as I feel this is probably already quite a lot to digest. If you would like to add comments, ideas, questions or anything like that, please feel free to register @ nooblogs.com, which is intended to be more for discussion and/or sharing of ideas.