be milled to an equidimensional powder, suspended in cream and spread across a city—unless, that is, they are intended only for uptake by subjects organized solely as mass receptors. An unusual mode of treatment therefore emerges: the mutation of communicational redundancy into hype. To protect a message from getting chewed up, so that the amount of noise interfering with its transmission becomes immaterial to its meaning being received unaltered, it is necessary to reiterate it in different ways. This protective surplus of enunciation is known as redundancy. Redundancy can apply both in terms of the information sent—its meaning can be made many times in many ways—and also to the composition of the channels of its transmission (as in the case of distributed networks such as the Internet). It is not clear, however, until the message is received, how much of the message—how many of its manifold reiterations—qualifies as actually being “redundant.” “Junk” data may just be those elements that are reiterated until the point at which the information enters into composition with actual consciousness—at which point the last one in the chain “expresses” its message into the carrier body. That is, they cease to be noise and can be evaluated as information. Redundant information, calculated as, say, the number of stickers in corners, on walls, on lampposts that it takes to build cognizance of this information in one subject, may immediately be understood as informational by another subject. Marketing works out a cost-benefit analysis wherein the number of potential exposures to the number of subjects is tabulated against the number of product purchase opportunity uptake actuations. This, however, does not map across to the same mode of operation as hype. The two uses of the word “information” are linked by their being used to describe conditions that refuse entropy. In the strict sense of information theory, information is measured on a scale of relative improbability where the state of maximum probability is that of entropy. The information carried linearly, from one point to another, by a message is the negative of its entropy. In the more common use of the term, information is simply “meaning”—what something “says” parsed by how it is “read”; how it is sensed, what perceptual and affective dynamics are routed through and with it, what is modulated and spun. Although the two uses of the term “information” are clearly not synonymous, what hype does is to blur the categories. Hype is that moment when the transmission of information in the strict sense reflexively incorporates information about the fact of its transmission as part of that trans-
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