On Frame Messages
So I've been reading everyone's favourite discrete maths textbook/metatextual paean to a Baroque composer Gödel, Escher, Bach for the first time actually, despite how influential it has been in the last 40 or so years since it was published and its relevance to the dorky subjects I'm interested in1.
In chapter 6 there's a discussion of the concept of 'Frame Messages', which exist on three nested levels: the inner message, the intentional message transmitted by the writer; the outer message, the environment which provides context to 'decode' the inner message; and the frame message, the message that there is in fact a message to decode.
Of course most messages don't follow this clean hierarchy, as messages recurse and embody different contexts (consider a random internet post like this one, but aggregated with hundreds of others, or screencapped and posted with a snarky reply by someone else, or cited in a news article or a legal case). In that case the outer message can significantly affect the interpretation even as the inner message stays the same.
Nowadays if you still hang around the open internet you are exposed to exponentially increasing amounts of messages, far more than even 20 or 30 years ago, hyper-optimised to target certain tribes. Also we have automatons that can produce at the very least somewhat convincing inner messages for basically any content that can be emitted as a digital stream. Perhaps instead (or on top of, the stylistic choices of a message are a inescapable part of the message after all) of obsessing about surface-level indicators of whether certain messages are artificially generated, you can consider what outer messages what you're looking at is (or isn't) communicating.
I figure I was too busy reading Infinte Jest to handle another Big Important Book.↩