What is information?

And is it new? is it actually at least three different things?

I don’t know all the background here, but around the turn of the millennium, someone, I assume Robert Jacobson, an HCI researcher at UW, asked Brenda Dervin to contribute a chapter to a book called Information Design. Information Design as a field doesn’t exist today the way Jacobson optimistically hopes in his 1999 introduction, and even in the forward, Richard Saul Wurman, the coiner of the term “information architecture” slightly snarkily points out that HE calls it information architecture. 

Jacobson argues in his introduction that with the advent of new electronic media, we are arriving at a place where designers aren’t designing with media in mind anymore, they’re designing with pure information.

I found a draft version of her chapter where you can tell by her introduction that she was pretty annoyed at the whole concept in a way I absolutely adore:

“The term information design is being offered in this volume as a designator of a new arena of activity. Part of the logic inherent in the presentation is the assumption that as a species we face altered circumstances which demand this new practice. In one version of the call – a version which I submit can be fairly labeled as the dominant version – it is assumed that prior to the advance of the new communication technologies there was no pressing need for information design. It is assumed that without the intervention of these increasingly unnatural channels humans achieved economical and effective distribution of information through existing channels in natural and intuitive ways. Further, it is assumed that beginning with the invention of the printing press and escalating to the explosion of communication technologies at the end of this century, more and more the artificialities of channels both technological and social have imposed themselves on information distribution.

All of this allows us to conjure up benign scenarios of the good old days when human talked directly to human and through gesture, talk, song, story, drum, and crafted sign or picture conveyed to each other something we call information. All of this forces us to be worried about the potential ethical and practical consequences of any call for a profession of information design. This profession, it seems, will be doing something unnatural to information which we had better watchdog; but, on the other hand, we need this profession to correct the unnatural impacts on information arising from communication technologies.

This approach to this new concept – information design – nests within it a host of assumptions about the nature of reality, human beings, and this something called information. Lengthy papers could be written on any one of them. Granting that there are many strong arguments implied by these assumptions, I want in this chapter to start by challenging the idea that information design is a new idea, or alternatively merely a new idea.”¹ ⊕ ¹ I think she edited a lot of that out from the final version, but I’m like, go off Brenda. 

She shares some generalized narratives about what information is: Starting with the idea that information is that which reflects an ordered reality, and then goes into the various contortions we have attempted to maintain that basic idea while also accounting for variability in perspectives, how the understanding of facts changes across time and by culture, and so on. 

She synthesizes these in her own narrative: “Information is a tool designed by human beings to make sense of a reality assumed to be both chaotic and orderly.” This allows us, she says, to understand the human condition “as a struggle through an incomplete reality.” (Dervin, 2003)

The important upshot of this is that information isn’t something out there that’s just existing and being true. Instead, humans are moving through this incomplete reality, continually constructing information out of it. As humans, we engage in acts of design to make information out of our worlds.

For me, this communication perspective on information restores a lot of the roughness to Shannon’s mathematically smooth model. “Information is made and unmade in communication,” rather than sitting on one end of an equation. 

We can still say that uncertainty exists, but it’s not about getting information from here to there. It’s about the amount of co-creation of information that needs to happen as a task is being completed. Dervin points out that traditional views of information see a sort of divide between order on one side and chaos on the other, with information serving order and being threatened by chaos. But that’s not what I see in Galbraith. Information is actually more important in a fluid environment than it is in a fixed one. More information is being created. That doesn’t mean it’s easier, making information sounds like work. It feels like it, too. 

References