ABSTRACT
This book acknowledges that, in the situation we now find ourselves, the political power of social computing lies far more in what Tim Jordan calls differences that form information, over and above differences that form communication. Operational and calculative hints produced at the asignifying level of information processing now cross articulate with the affective and the illocutionary features of habit and desire to move us together and apart at certain speeds and velocities on a daily basis. Knowledge graphs are indebted to second-order cybernetics and the field's conceptualization of self-organizing systems. Self-organizing systems are those that, despite striving for operational closure, are structured in such a way as to remain open and adaptable to change as a function of maintaining/postponing that closure. As the information retrieval relation bleeds into more intimate registers of life in network societies, these interests risk further defining our relationship to signs as such in a way that may foreclose upon other conceptual possibilities.
