Zumthor Reading response among other thoughts

Excerpt (pg. 16-17):

"Everything merges into everything else, and mass communication creates an artificial world of signs. Arbitrariness prevails. Postmodern life could be described as a state in which everything beyond our own personal biography seems vague, blurred, and somehow unreal. The world is full of signs and information, which stand for things that no one fully understands because they, too, turn out to be mere signs for other things. The real thing remains hidden. No one ever gets to see it."

He goes on to say that the "real" things are earth, water, light, landscapes, vegetation and man made objects such as machines, tools, or musical instruments, existing as they are (not "vehicles for an artistic message"). These things are at peace with themselves, apparently.

I disagree with Zumthor's implied statement that the "signs and information" are unreal. If I'm not mistaken, we seem to be living in the Digital Age (Information Age). We are surrounded by, engulfed, bombarded, and absorb these "signs and information" almost every second of the day. Cell phones, email, blogs, texting, instant messaging, video phones, tv and radio (and their internet counterparts), wikipedia, advertisements, news from everywhere in the world you could possibly think of, social networking and online dating sites, pornography, higher education even!...the list goes on for quite a while. The access to an almost unlimited amount of information that the industrialized world has is unprecedented in the history of man. It would be impossible to absorb even a fraction of a percentage of this information in an entire human life time. And, it all seems very real to me. I could spend hours on the internet, checking my email, going from random site to random site, absorbing and learning things I'd never known before.

If architecture is inclusive of a greater idea, a contextual response to the day and age in which it is executed and performed, what would buildings be like if they responded to this? A multitaneous experience that could be different and the same, stimulating and anesthetizing, grotesque and beautiful...can architecture, through the built and unbuilt environment, do what the internet and information age has done? An architecture that expresses things beyond human experience and architectural detailing, a black hole perhaps?

The real things are percieved in the same exact manner as the signs and information (neurons and synapses firing in the brain). And honestly, there is nothing at peace in the world that we live in, whether it be humanity, nature, or the universe: it is all pure chaos. Nothing is at peace with itself, even Zumthor's preciously detailed, perfectly jointed boxes are always experiencing some level of chaos.