infopolitics

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Via @berkmancenter, an interesting-looking conference at the New School, Feb. 24–26:

The central question asked by this proposed conference is, where is America today with respect to the limits on our access to information, limits on what we can keep confidential and what the government and other institutions can keep secret? How can the public gain access to information and how do we decide what information is a citizen’s right to know? What information endangers individuals’ or the country’s wellbeing and safety? Are the ever-increasing number of technological innovations fundamentally transforming what we can know and what we cannot? What can remain confidential and what cannot? On the one hand, technology has aided access to information and knowledge to broader and broader communities, thus eroding limits, while on the other hand, technologies are increasingly used by governments, businesses, and other social institutions to monitor and interfere with what we can know and cannot know and what is private and what is not.

An interesting array of speakers. Bios here.

I’m going to be blogging notes from this talk by David Weinberger at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard. Usual caveats apply (all things not in quotes paraphrased, sometimes badly.) Here we go!

• Asking how information became our dominant metaphor. What did we become? How are we moving out of it? After 50 years of understanding ourselves as in an information age, what has come of it?
• Early stage of thinking about this, but presenting initial ideas.
• Example 1 of informationalization: DNA as one way we are seeing ourselves as informationalized. We depict it as a code in schematic, but in fact it’s a lumpen molecule. The molecule itself is not information, it’s just a shoelace-like molecular chain.
• Example 2: Kurtzweil’s question about when we’ll be able to model the entire matter of the brain and keep it running in a computer—and, live for ever, at least as a neurological model.
• Example 3: sense data, sensation, perception, judgment. — and lately, information ahead of sense data.
• Last example: Wolfram: the universe is a computer.
• What is information? (But put your hands down, information scholars.) It’s hard for most people to define this, and for many of us it escapes definition.
• Five meanings

1. Charles Babbage, the reputed creator of a computer (which he never finished). His sense of information: “something you didn’t know but now you do.”
2. A second from Babbage: “The contents of a table—standardized expression”
3. 1948, Claude Shannon’s paper. Task was to figure out how much “information” could move through a given transmission line. Useful because he was working at Bell Labs. So “information” was a “sequence of choices from a finite set of elementary symbols” as transmitted.
4. Meaning of symbols unimportant, except in that information is what you couldn’t have known for certain already. —— Information: The New Language of Science: a book with several contradicting definitions. —— Charles Seife from Decoding the Universe: Also concerned with symbols. And puts “information” in cells.
5. The stuff in computers
6. Everything, at all. Most expansively, “literally the stuff of the universe”

• Possible argument emerging, that the history of information is discontinuous, and Shannon’s insight was important. Marks, holes in cards, need to be part of a system.
• Why did this (information, or information theory, sometimes both) become so important in its march through the culture?

1. For one, it’s useful. Shannon’s work and following lowered data storage costs.
2. Two, versatility of bits. (Bit is a unit of measurement, and all other units measure a thing, whereas bits measure anything–maybe with certain mathematical exceptions.)
3. Three, information explains communication. Jump to communication theory from information theory happened fast “but not in a way that would have made Claude Shannon happy.” The definition of communication gets really broad.

• What information excludes… Well, it doesn’t help us with the meaning, only with shoving the meaning around. Models are useful, but they leave out “the bodily, the ‘mattering’ of the personal, and the contingent.”
• Argument [and I’m paraphrasing] that bits present the world to us as a set of things without qualities, whereas our experience of the world is not in this disaffected, encoded condition.
• How did the wartime environment of information and communication theory affect the way we view it? Noise of course could be quite literal on the battlefield. So could “encoding,” for the cryptographically inclined.
• All this is not the only way of talking about communication, which is a much more diverse phenomenon than information theory’s view of information. Demonstrates this on way through Descartes and then Heidegger.
• So if the age of information is ending, what’s next? Not trying to assert something, but now, maybe the network. And among other things this means that we don’t focus on “agreement” anymore as much as “servicing and maintaining differences,” which the Internet excels at.