Roles, not substances

Event, signal, and trace describe roles. They are not permanent species of thing.

Lewis's email is a trace while it sits in Maya's inbox. When she opens it months later, the email becomes an active signal in the new moment. The meeting itself is an event when it occurs. Maya's remembered image of the meeting is a trace later retrieved. Her current bodily response is a signal, partly shaped by traces of the earlier event.

A photograph can occupy several roles at once. It is a digital trace in storage, a social trace if shared by a family, an institutional trace if entered as evidence, and an active signal when it appears on a screen. The categories do not compete for ownership. They ask different questions.

Once the roles are separated, five questions become easier to ask: What happened? What information is available now? What has persisted enough to return? What am I inferring from it? What world is being rendered from the combination?

This role-based approach prevents the vocabulary from becoming a filing system more elaborate than the life it is meant to clarify. It also exposes a common mistake: calling an interpretation a signal.

"He is trying to push me out" is not a signal. It is an interpretation.

The signals may include Lewis's words, the public setting, the delay, the missing follow-up, and Maya's bodily alarm. The interpretation may be reasonable, mistaken, partly accurate, or impossible to settle. But once it is labeled as something seen directly, it becomes harder to examine without feeling that reality itself is being denied.