| Late response, but: there are some interesting symmetries and contrasts in various informational concepts. One is what you and Benjamin are highlighting: the distinction between message traveling to audience and audience traveling to message. Generally a forum or theatre are both examples where an audience assembles to receive or view a message. Similarly for museums or in situ* attractions. It's possible to appreciate the Taj Mahal or Machu Picchu or Yosemite or the Grand Canyon in person only by visiting those places. Flagship performance venues such as La Scala, the Bayreuth Festival, Lincoln Center, or New York's Broadway also attract audiences from around the world. A contrast is tours in which some object or performer(s) travel a circuit over which two or more audiences are assembled and performances take place. There's some localised travel, but in large part it is the message which travels to the audience. Classic film-based cinema scales this up further, with physical film spools touring through projection rooms, traditionally beginning in larger and wealthier markets before hitting secondary and rural ones (there was a time when films might open in New York and Los Angeles weeks, or months, before even large Midwest cities such as Chicago). Digital distribution has made simultaneous openings much more common. Broadcast, cable, and Internet transmissions take this concept even further where a performance is delivered directly to the home, business, desk, or hands of the audience via radio, television, desktop computer, or mobile phone. And of course books and printed materials afforded a similar service centuries earlier (though the true fall in prices and rise in volume began only in the 19th century, and in many ways was a 20th century phenomenon). Generalising: - Networks distribute messages. - Spaces (or venues) assemble audiences. There are hybrid forms as well: - Media Channels combine distribution with an assembled audience. - Tours visit a series of audience across a travel path. - Archives gather records to spaces which readers can visit and access large quantities of information at little marginal cost (effort, time, distance, energy). <https://diaspora.glasswings.com/posts/3aa6e840ac7a0139294f00...> There's another symmetry I've noticed between records and signals generally: - Signals transmit encoded symbolic messages from a transmitter across space through a channel by variations in energy over time subject to noise to a receiver potentially creating a new record. - Records transmit encoded symbolic messages from a writer through a substrate across time by variations in matter over space subject to decay to a reader potentially creating a new signal. |