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Some
Reference Points for Discussion
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Preliminary Class Business
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Deepening and Broadening the Concept of Information:The
Historical Approach
- In studying the role of information in "postindustrial"
society as well as "postmodern" art, we have in this
course so far taken an extremely presentist approach to information
culture. Indeed, we even been futurological—as in the prophecies
of Workplace 2000 or The Road Ahead, or the "near-future"
science fiction of Neuromancer.
- The present of information culture is ultimately what we are
trying to understand—and it is where this course will end
up. But the risk of looking only at the "cutting-edge"
present is that:
- it limits our concept of information (e.g., the notions
of information contained in the National
Information Infrastructure documents)
- it exaggerates the "revolutionary" break of
the information revolution with the human past (e.g., the
thesis of the "New
Economy")
- Cf., John Seely Brown & Paul Duguid, The Social
Life of Information, pp. 32-33
- At this point, therefore, we will take advantage of the fact
that this is a humanities course (the special method of the
humanities being historical inquiry) to take for a few weeks
the opposite tack:
- a review of the history
of information—specifically the history of the
past "revolutions" in media and forms of human
expression that underlie our contemporary notion of information
- Guiding questions for this part of the course: What do
the well-read (those steeped in the knowledges and literatures
of the past) have to teach the well-informed? And how, reciprocally,
do the well-informed teach the well-read to resee past knowledges
and literatures in a new light (as themselves engagements
with information technology and media)?
- Some works that take a view of the general history of information
(histories specifically of 20th-century information technology
and media to be covered in later classes):
- Michael E. Hobart and Zachary S. Schiffman, Information
Ages: Literacy, Numeracy, and the Computer Revolution
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1998)
- Charles Jonscher, The Evolution of Wired Life:
From the Alphabet to the Soul-Catcher Chip–How Information
Technologies Change Our World (New York: John Wiley
& Sons, 1999)
- Albert Borgmann, Holding On to Reality: The
Nature of Information at the Turn of the Millennium
(Chicago: U. Chicago Press, 1999)
- Walter Benjamin, "The
Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"
(1936)
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Borgmann: A General Semiotics For the Study of
Information
Locating the Study of Information Amid the Human and Social Sciences:
Some Definitions of Terms
Linguistics: "The study of human speech including the
units, nature, structure, and modification of language—compare
Philology" (Webster's Ninth New Collegiate
Dictionary)
Semiotics: "A general philosophical theory of signs
and symbols . . ." (Webster's
Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary)
Semiology: "It is therefore possible to conceive of
a science which studies the role of signs as a part of social life. . . .
We shall call it semiology (from the Greek semeion, 'sign').
It would investigate the nature of signs and the laws governing
them" (Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in
General Linguistics, p. 15)
Later Disciplines Relevant to Information: Information Theory,
Communication Studies, Media Studies, Cognitive Science
- Borgmann's version of modern semiotic theory (pp.
18, 22):
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Intelligence — Person — Sign — Thing — Context
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- Important features of Borgmann's semiotics of information
(and its implicit ethics of information):
- Expansive: the importance of rooting the operation
of signs in a wider psychological and social "context")
(p. 20)
- Symmetrical:
- bilateral symmetry between the realm of cognition
[Intelligence-Person] and the realm of being [Thing-Context]
- the "sign" as the centered pivot-point
or interface between the two realms
- "Orderly" and "Coherent": (pp.
1, 25, 34, 6)
- Contrast the usual experience of contemporary information:
- Reductive (concentration on the transmission of
"bits" and "packets")
- Asymmetrical (focus on the "virtual"
realm of Person-Sign at the expense of Thing-Context)
- Disorderly and Incoherent ("random access")
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Borgmann: An Evolutionary Typology of Information
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Natural Signs — Conventional Signs — Technological Signs
(p. 2)
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- The semiotics of "natural signs" in the "ancestral
environment":
- ThingSign: the iconic relation between "things"
and "signs"
- Signs are things / Things are signs (p.
1) (original meaning of "inform," p.
9)
- Signs and things alternate roles in an orderly way
depending on "focal presence" or "distance"
relative to the person (p. 25)
- In cognitive terms, this means that the relation between
"direct" and "indirect" information
is well-ordered (pp. 17, 15)
- "The eloquence of things"
- A "well-ordered" world of information is
one in which the "balance" between the realms
of Persons-Intelligence [consciousness] and Things-Context
[being] around the interface of Signs means that the
world has as much to say as human beings (p.
29)
- The semiotics of "conventional" or "cultural"
signs:
- Thing/Sign:
- Signs refer to things. Signs no longer (primarily)
are things (p. 1)
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Conventional signs "stand out" from the
world of things (e.g., a cairn). Put another way,
this means that a conventional sign's meaning "exceeds
what can be gleaned from its surroundings"
(p. 30) Indeed, in
conventional signs there is an inverse proportion
between "meaning" and "thingness"
(pp. 36-37) Conventional
signs thus always give "indirect knowledge"
- Conventional signs can be made detachable from
things and thus rendered portable (p.
1)
- Conventional signs require the social support,
education, and mental discipline to compensate for
their distance from things (p.
37)
- The Increasing Eloquence of Persons
- More signs; signs about signs (p.
10)
- The semiotics of "technological" signs:
- Sign instead of Thing
- Technological signs refer to things ever more indirectly
from an increased distance (the age of "tele"-information:
telegraphy, telephone, radio, television, satellite
and fiber-optic telecom, wide-area networks or WANs,
etc.)
- Technological signs are ultra-detachable and -portable
(especially in the transition from analog to digital
information; age of mobile computing and telecom)
- Technological signs become reality (p.
2). In the digital era, this happens through
the common reduction of signs and things to bits.
- The Eloquence of Media (Marshall McLuhan: "the
medium is the message"; Jean Baudrillard, "simulation")
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References
- Michael Dertouzos, What Will Be: How the New World
of Information Will Change Our Lives (New York: HarperEdge
/ HarperCollins, 1998)
- Bill Gates, The Road Ahead, rev. ed. (New York:
Penguin, 1996)
- Michael E. Hobart and Zachary S. Schiffman, Information
Ages: Literacy, Numeracy, and the Computer Revolution (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1998)
- Charles Jonscher, The Evolution of Wired Life: From
the Alphabet to the Soul-Catcher Chip–How Information Technologies
Change Our World (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1999)
- Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics,
ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, trans. Roy Harris (La
Salle, Illinois: Open Court, 1986)
Supplementary
links for this class on Study Materials page
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