Communication, Social Action, and Cities

This is part of a series of thoughts that are thematically bounded by a criticism of capitalism, communication, and rationality.

When one infuses messages into a medium, it does count as communication until someone else extracts the messages.

The time between the extraction of messages and responding to them is response time.

The faster the extraction of messages, the faster one gains information.

If the person does not understand the message, then the person must use other sources (people or mediums) to communicate to in order to understand the message.

The person’s understanding is the completion of the one-way communication.

In the case of a social situation:
The faster the two can respond, the faster the person will understand the meaning of the message.

Once the meaning is understood, the person can create a new message for further communication (an action itself).

Once the communication ends, there are three possibilities:… [todo: stopped here]

social action:
Often, the reason one creates messages is to have one’s rationality validated or, in the case of more than one person, come to a consensus. Once validated, one is able to proceed with a social action.

cities [urban areas] and social action:
Because cities have such high density (people / social and material / urban), communication often takes place in the same space, allow communication through body language, oral language, urban art, in addition to non-space-based mediums (e.g. listening to radio, talking through instant messaging), often simultaneously.

Because people are able to respond faster, understand meaning, continue communication, get validation of rational or come to a consensus, people are able to act faster.

[Hmm, I was trying to extract some tacit knowledge of why consensual social action is more frequent in cities than outside of them. I wasn’t able quite to do it. I often use the internet to communicate, not to another person in the same social time, reading several sources, to validate my actions. Actually, I often privilege the internet over many people as a source of validation.]