Information can produce, bypass, or actively destroy meaning

Evidence

Either information produces meaning (a negentropic factor), but cannot make up for the brutal loss of signification in every domain. Despite efforts to reinject message and content, meaning is lost and devoured faster than it can be reinjected. … Or information has nothing to do with signification. It is something else, an operational model of another order, outside meaning and of the circulation of meaning strictly speaking. This is Shannon’s hypothesis: a sphere of information that is purely functional, a technical medium that does not imply any finality of meaning, and thus should also not be implicated in a value judgment. A kind of code, like the genetic code: it is what it is, it functions as it does, meaning is something else that in a sense comes after the fact, as it does for Monod in Chance and Necessity. … Or, very much on the contrary, there is a rigorous and necessary correlation between the two, to the extent that information is directly destructive of meaning and signification, or that it neutralizes them. The loss of meaning is directly linked to the dissolving, dissuasive action of information, the media, and the mass media. — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 266

Categorization

• XREF: Sets up Baudrillard’s third hypothesis directly against Shannon’s technical information theory; connects to Jameson’s account of late-capitalist semiotic saturation and to poststructuralist critiques of communication. — connects to: To be acted upon can mean destruction or conservation — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity,…, 446; Decoded meanings, not messages, are what produce effects; Information is structurally prevented from becoming genuine thought — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays…, 126 (+2 more)
• DEFINE: Distinguishes three rival hypotheses about the information-meaning relation, locating Shannon’s as the purely functional ‘no finality of meaning’ model.

Broader Connections

• Information is structurally prevented from becoming genuine thought #contradicts (0.78) — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 126
• Decoded meanings, not messages, are what produce effects #expands (0.75)
• To be acted upon can mean destruction or conservation #expands (0.72) — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 446
• Substance’s actuosity is simultaneously creative and destructive power #expands (0.72) — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 1102