Information
codes

A word is a code containing information. We should not underestimate the ability of programming, through different means, to influence us, because every transfer of information is, in itself, a form of influence. The question is how the receiving mind is able to decode the quality of the influence it receives. Choosing the right words is not a simple task when the goal is to transmit a message that creates an image — a picture that is processed neurologically and becomes part of memory, which the subconscious can continue to use from the moment one intellect encounters another. A reader meets a writer through an external object, such as this article, a post within an Internet blog, and the written data is reflected into the reader's internal world as a form of code written in words.

Everyone is unique. Every person contains their own representation of the external world — each person and their own world. Yet the language we choose to transmit messages sometimes contains shared egregores: common structures of meaning that allow people to recognize and exchange ideas. For example, anyone who knows how to read and use an electronic computing device connected to the Internet can reach this source and read this text. But the question remains: is the text understood in every language in the same way that it exists in its original form, inside the thoughts of the writer? This is a question that I also find difficult to answer. What I can do is try to explain the essence of the programming within these ideas.

Over the twenty years between the ages of twenty and forty, I collected information from an enormous variety of sources. Sometimes it was a book I returned to repeatedly. Sometimes it was an article that helped strengthen or expand an idea from that book. Sometimes it was a news broadcast, a film, a conversation, or simply an image reconstructed from memory. At other times, the Internet itself became the source: I examined how websites were built, studied different courses, learned about marketing, and gradually discovered how digital advertising could connect specific messages with specific audiences. Looking back, I realize that I was not simply collecting information. I was building an internal system for connecting it.

That process eventually led me toward the Internet as a technological environment. In 2010, I began studying more seriously how the Web worked and what HTML actually was. A friend from high school introduced me to a user interface for managing a virtual server, and this gave me a clearer understanding of operating systems as software running on hardware. From there, I became increasingly interested in global information systems, data communication, websites, and the way information could move between machines and people. Somewhere along that path I learned the word “blog.” I remember reading Google's early guidance on search engine optimization, during a period when SEO was becoming part of the vocabulary of the growing digital advertising industry. I had already experienced the advertising world from inside a large local company, and I began to see how technology was changing the way information could be presented, distributed, and eventually turned into influence.

I also became interested in the visual side of the Internet. I experimented with combining languages, HTML, CSS, and interface design, but I understood that the technology itself was not the main subject. Long before I started studying websites, I had already been influenced by The Matrix and by the idea that computer-generated images could change the way people experienced a story. Technology was becoming a new layer between information and perception. I became interested not only in what programmers were building, but also in what managers, marketers, and communicators were trying to accomplish with those systems.

Later, as YouTube became increasingly popular, I discovered another form of communication: the VLOG. One of the first examples I remember watching was a vlog by Bob Parsons. I found it interesting not only because of the content, but because it gave me another reason to listen to English and become more comfortable with a language that was not my first. At the time, I was still young and curious, and I could already imagine combining video, writing, websites, and technology into something of my own. Yet I chose to focus on other things. I learned to write software, continued working with technology, and eventually moved through different professional directions. Today, artificial intelligence makes some parts of programming look remarkably simpler, but I do not regret learning them the harder way. That experience became part of the system I carry with me.

Years later, after I was already over thirty-five, I unexpectedly returned to that old memory of the video. I could no longer find the original recording online, but the memory itself remained. I remembered that Parsons had spoken not only about technology and business, but also about hunting. That detail stayed with me because it connected two seemingly different worlds: the technological environment and the human instinct behind it. From a marketing perspective, I could understand another part of the picture as well. A company that wants to continue growing needs an image that can reach as many people as possible without creating unnecessary barriers. The message, the image, the product, and the person receiving them all become part of the same information system.

This is also why writing publicly feels different from simply writing for yourself. Starting an open blog requires responsibility, risk management, motivation, goodwill, the desire to succeed, and an awareness that failure is always possible. Behind every sentence there are countless neurological processes deciding what to notice, what to ignore, what to remember, and what to forget. I have spent years learning how information moves through technology, media, language, memory, and human behavior. Now I am trying to understand what happens when I deliberately place my own thoughts into that system.

One of the books that stayed with me during this process was Emotional Intelligence. I bought it years ago, but it took almost twenty years before I reached a point where I could finally sit down and read it from beginning to end with enough concentration. What remained with me was a simple idea: human beings, like other animals, operate with basic mechanisms of fear, caution, risk assessment, concern, and reaction. We give these mechanisms different names depending on the context, but they are part of the intelligence through which an organism interprets its environment.

My own history also taught me that information is not the same as wisdom. I once wanted to help my father stop using nicotine and alcohol because I was afraid of what would eventually happen to his health. I failed to change the outcome. He used to tell me in Russian, “The egg cannot teach the chicken.” He is no longer here, but the sentence remains with me because memory does something that information alone cannot do: it gives data a personal meaning.

And this brings me back to the logic of reading these words. Everything I have written so far could be reduced to one precise question:

How do you make people remember the wisdom contained in data?

It is possible to make people read a short article. But how do you make them remember the wisdom represented by the information?

Now before the edits, I am writing this entire article in this way, directly and continuously. I am going to use an instrument that allows me to translate the Hebrew version into English. Perhaps later I will also try to transform it into another form of written Hebrew. But all of this is one original creation of an ongoing thought process through time.

I am exploring this question through music as well. Repetition gives us a way to preserve information we have already learned deeply, sometimes allowing us to remember it years after we have forgotten the feelings and circumstances that surrounded the moment when we first learned it. What once became part of our intellect through new terminology and a new direction of thought can remain encoded within us, connected to the image that moved from the external world into our internal one. I will try to explore this further in the next post.

I began writing at 09:00, and I wanted to complete everything written here by 10:00. Somewhere in the middle, I found myself thinking about the quality of the message I was transmitting. And the message itself is simple:

Welcome to my blog.

This is my first post. Please continue to the next one — although I have not written it yet. In the meantime, you can read what I have already written about artificial intelligence, because this tool helped create the reason for the next post.

Allow me to return to my persistent thoughts, on how to explain my music. I can only transmit the complete message to someone who understands the terminology and context of the subject itself. Just as I now have to write the code that allows me to present the words and explain the differences between them, a message written in Russian, Hebrew, or any language used by computers can still be understood differently by every reader. The language may be shared, but the meaning is always interpreted through the world of the person receiving it.

English is my third language, and there are N more languages to learn. Before the code written by someone else, however, there is another language — the language of images and representations that comes before words. It is like zero, before the first bit is set.