What Information Was, David Weinberger, 11/10, 12:30 pm ET
Tuesday’s (11/10) Berkman Center for Internet & Society Luncheon Series features David Weinberger on What Information Was.
“It’s puzzling that even though we named an age after information, very few people can tell you what information is. And the ones with the clearest answers are often defining information in the technical sense, which is not the sense in which the culture took it up. In this session, we’ll look back at information, trying to understand what about it led us to embrace it as the dominant — paradigmatic — way of understanding ourselves and our world. David Weinberger will present an informal sketch of a direction, suggesting that we leaped into information because it reflected a long-held but squirrely metaphysics. There will be lots of time for open discussion.”
Folks attending in person should RSVP by Monday afternoon to rsvp @ cyber dot law dot harvard dot edu. Webcast listeners should tune in around 12:30 pm Tuesday.
Addenda 11/10: Notes from the talk:
Information has become a cradle to grave problem and certainty. Despite the fact that we’ve left the Stone Age, we still use stone in lots of the same ways that we used it back then. Information is the same way. It will always exist. We will always need it.
information
sense data
sensation
…
perception
The universe itself might be made of information, according to quantum information theorists. But, really, what is information?
With the exception of the occasional computer scientist, we do not *know* what information is. We talk about it all the time, but if we try to define it, we just end up with discrepancies. 200+ definitions exist, including the technical definition, which is not what David Weinberger means with this talk.
Information theory indicates two primary kinds/definitions of information, based on Charles Babbage’s thoughts: “something you didn’t know and now you do” and “the contents of a table-standardized expression.” Claude Shannon took over the term and created a new, highly technical meaning for it. There is now a mathematical expression about information. Page 36, chapter 1 has a good definition involving transferring information. That definition is “not what the culture took up” from the definition.
Something you are about to learn -> contents of a table ->
(he’s moving too fast for me to take notes about his slides)
why?
what enabled information to take over the world?
its utility
its politics
Information theory lets us figure out how to handle information, like with computers and hard drives. Without it, our world and its devices would be very different.
Information works by reducing the amount of information associated with an object. Our current age makes it seem like information is more about overload than stipping things down to their essential bits.
“We are far better able to manage the abundance of crap than the abundance of good. … The good stuff is the challenge to our culture. … [people and institutions] assume a scarcity of the good stuff.” Many ideas are premised on the assumption that there’s not enough good stuff and people will pay for it. Institutions depending on scarcity fail. Newspapers are dealing with these challenges now and new revenue models. The amount of signal that looks like noise is clouding things.
“Of course, this requires new ways to organize things. I am not going to talk about that.”
We need to know how to enter and navigate the information respositories. Precision and recall used to be key concepts. Relevance and “interestingness” are newer concepts when dealing with search results.
Old ideas about how to enter the information space (think Tron or Desk Set) might not work these days. The newer generation is fused so well with information, they are always in the world of information.
“Bits apply to everything.” Everything has a base in information.
Information became a dominant metaphor during the communication age. At the beginning, Shannon was working with a communication theory and expressed that he wasn’t dealing with semantics. Warren Weaver wrote about similar ideas and went so far as to give a very loose, broad definition of communication. “We have a conduit metaphor for communication theory.” But why? Vibrations traveling through the air make the basics of communication, but that’s not what’s important to us. What’s important to us are the topics. Descartes and metaphysics show how people can visualize their worlds in their heads, perhaps to the point of us never being able to reach true reality. The world is something that’s interesting and relevant. Maybe one now sees the world differently because of the communication. How much do messages matter without everything that’s interesting and important?
During war time, someone came up with a theory of improvements related to the various needs of war, like having communication techniques that work through explosions, chaos, and broken communication lines.
Are links content or medium? Both? They add information to a page while supplying a path through a linked world. Generative paths. In our world, we assume information just works.
Models. Yucca Flats and atomic wastes. The financial meltdown. There are always limitations, no matter how hard we try. Purely formal abstractions leave out important pieces. It all comes back down to bits, these measurements of differences. Our ability to use and model bits comes back down to them being exactly how the world is not.
“Agree, support, dispute, discount, disagree, reject, recommend, extend, amplify, endorse, denounce, concur, connect” shown in a linking web
Fragments express differences we don’t appreciate enough.
David Weinberger is, as always, awesomely fascinating.
Q&As:
Q: A link breaks down the traditional view of information because it’s a link and information at the same time and clouds whatever information exists about sequence. Word order has information and meaning. Links change that. Should someone click the link immediately? Finish the page and return to the link or linked material? What?
A: One debate related to information theory has to do with language being a part of information and coming up with an information theory above just language theory. Lots of signaling happens all around us. It’s not all linguistic. Are links linguistic or something else? Word order is linguistic. Underlines or different colors for links.
Q: John Palfrey asked very elegantly about how David’s lecture fits with the other work he’s done. Ethan Zuckerman said he was going to ask a similar question simply as “So, what?”
A: David builds on his own intersts that might not interest anyone else. He hopes he’s contributing to the dialog.
Q: How do links work with various interoperability issues?
A: Everything is information and everything is miscellaneous. David doesn’t think it’s the age of links, but rather the age of the network. We’re rethinking everything as networks.
Q: You’ve done a great job of defining how we got to where we are. What’s next?
Q: Information is an abstraction, but tech dependent. Focusing on the tech limitations and relationship with information might help it seem more normative.
Q: When you talk about distinctions, you talk about someone how has given something a distinction. What about inserting human agency into information?
A: “Three fabulous questions and I’ll be done at some time in 2011 answering them.” We don’t know what’s next, but we can grope our way forward.
Is saying viruses communicate backreading into what viruses are doing? Do viruses really transmit information? Does a Jacard loom contain information?
Information already has a human element in it. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be information.
Ethan Zuckerman wrote about the talk, too. His thoughts, like usual, are worth a read.
November 10th, 2009 at 2:02 pm
[...] talk on his blog, though he tells me that the outline is an earlier version of the presentation. J’s of J’s scratchpad offers her notes from the talk as well – might be useful as a complement to my account here. [...]