"But where danger is, grows

The saving power also" Holderlin

As Michael Heim has written, the power of technology comes from the ability of it to comsume and permutate as soon as we recognize and try to foundationalize its essence.  This takes off from what Heidegger has appropriated from German poet Holderlin in the fragment above.  The power of information, which is the langauge of technology, comes from its ability to instill extreme danger and horror in the user of both technology and information.  We cannot possibly examine all of the material on any one subject we decide to investigate.  The percentage that we might ever be able to comprehend, appropriate and use in our own work is presupposed by how much we really want to investigate, how deep we would like to traverse the informational data that surrounds our electrical superstructure.  Investigation then leads to a certain amount of disdain on the part of the finder when faced with the daunting task of cataloging, apportioning, reviewing, and using the information at hand.  How do i go about figuring out what is really relavant to what i want to discuss?  Where does my investigation begin and end?  As one soons realizes, the links to other amounts and forms of information grow exponentially rather than incrementally.  But boundaries do exist that cannot be, at this time, circumvented.  We cannot transpose physicality into electrical information; we cannot go faster than our fastest inlet or "modem connection;" we cannot actually "feel" the relationships we engage in through the electronic medium--physical feeling.  Psychically though, we are head over heels about some notions that are arising about infopower:

1.  We can manipulate previous notions of textuality.

2.  We can manipulate and translate on a moments notice arcane languages, sublime moments of cultural exchange, and personages as the have come to be known on use-nets, MOO's, chat boards, etc.

3.  We can now understand the power of information in more than strictly just linear and rational means.

4.  Information becomes the method by which decisions are made.  On this presumption then, those who control the information we receive (more so than ever now), have the power to deflect attention and attitudes towards false means and ends.  Thus the hierarchy of information allows for deception and permutation within the heirarchy while at the same time changing the hierarchy itself.

5.  The ability to communicate now becomes the essential "tool" or "marketable skill" to have in this new cultural worldview.  Communication allows for and assists in the greater dissemination and variety of
the views and information we recieve.  But at the same time (the "danger") the verifiability of the information becomes much more difficult and slippery.

Michael Heim calls this new motivation of information to have a "life of its own," info mania.  This allows for information to remain rational, yet at the same time something to be ecstatic and manical about.  Info power boosts and regulates at the same time.  It controls and lets itself be controlled without any real intention but its own self-preservation.  In a market-driven ideological framework along Veblenian lines, we can now see how appropriate information is for the capital crazy system.  Information, like capital, only worries about one thing:  the production of more capital and information, which Marx truly predicted over a century ago.
 

"If by stealth one tries to overcome it,  It becomes for him a dream, If he uses force to make himself Its peer it punishes him. Often it suprises one Who hardly ever thought it."

Holderlin