A Brief History of Information
More than ever before, information is all around us and, while most people take it for granted, few can define the term. The word “information” in English is rather flexible and it means many things to many people.
The Urra-hubullu encyclopedia, one of the earilest of its kind
To borrow from Justice Potter Stewart, who was writing about the difficulty of defining “obscenity,” I know information when I see it.
When we need a phone number, we dial “information” (well, we used to, before the Web). We get information about a specific event (a party, a wedding) and we get information when we read a newspaper (be it online or a printed version).
We get information when we chitchat and we get information when we attend meetings and conferences.
The American Heritage Dictionary has one of the better definitions I’ve found, namely “knowledge derived from study, experience, or instruction.” It goes on to add “Knowledge of specific events or situations that has been gathered or received by communication; intelligence or news” and “A collection of facts or data.”
A brief look at the roots and origin of the word “information” also helps us to better understand it. The word comes from the Old French “informacion,” which in turn came from the Latin “informationem” (nominative “information”), which means an outline, concept, or idea. Informationem was the noun of action from informare, from which we derive our verb “inform.”
But I digress.
The reason information is important is because human beings simply have had to communicate with one another since the dawn of civilization. From cave paintings and oral history to the beginnings of a written tradition, mankind has documented and recorded that which is important and left it for future generations.
An increase in the human population, combined with improved tools for sharing information (starting with the tablet, paper, movable type, and going all the way into the computer age), has resulted in more information being created today than perhaps anyone had ever anticipated. What haven’t been developed in lockstep with this are tools that allow us to filter information so we get not only what we need but also that which we can absorb.
Despite great technological advances, we actually understand very little about how to manage information. Until we do learn more about managing what really has become a flood of information, all we can do is try to cope with the reality of Information Overload.
This Analyst Opinion is also available online at
Jonathan B. Spira is CEO and Chief Analyst at Basex.
July 23rd, 2010 13:10
I have stated this several times and even develop the concept in my website:
One gets Information from a message when the data contained in this message makes one feel less uncertain bout the present or future environment in which one lives/ In simpler words when the message received makes one feel at least somewhat more in control. Many messages we receive only contain data that one doesn’t care about or worse, data that one doesn’t want at all in which case this message can be considered “noise”
This definition is inspired from Claude Shannon’s Information theory but is quite generalisable to messages we receive.
What we receive is too often masses of data that we don’t care about…
When this data is pertinent, only then does it become information. In that sense we are missing information while we receive too much data.
All these messages are but increasing Entropy, that is, the tendency of the physical world to move towards maximum disorder. A French scholar has coined the term “Neguentropy” to speak about information: Information is what limits the tendency towards disorder. On the contrary masses of data just increase entropy, that is the tendency towards disorder. That is what most of us perceive in a world of data procesing supported via ever faster networks.
I wish data processing would really become information processing, an idea that I have developped on my website…
Paul
July 23rd, 2010 16:13
The reason information is important is because human beings like to be in control, for that they need to get organized for today as well as for the future. Communicating with other human beings helped them understanding what they were after and hence avoid problems. Understanding messages from nature or from other human beings helped them learning where was the next bison herd located. That enabled them to get food while expending less energy. Energy was and still is a rare commodity and without energy the loss of control is inevitable.
There is a tight link between information and energy. For example, the human brain is the human body organ that requires the maximum energy to function when related to its relative weight.So, using one’sbrain to think in view of communicating requires a relatively high energy quantity, and energy of a high quality such as sugar. Every time one uses energy its quality diminishes, that means it becomes less and less usable for a large variety of purposes. That is sometimes refered as Entropy. Entropy means that once energy is used it cannot be regained without receiving external energy input. Information allows one to minimise this energy quality loss. Energy quality loss increases uncertainty of the individual who needed it So information helps staying in control longer.
Unfortunately, masses of data that one receives provide very little information, they just confuse issues more than they were before we received such masses of data.
Data about a subjet becomes information only if we have less uncertainty about that subject than we had before we received the data. If we end up having more uncertainty on the subject, we didn’t receive information, entropy just grew up on us.
But information can be transmitted via other means than communication messages : a useful object or technique that makes us less vulnerable tu uncertainty carries a certain amount of information, for example a high quality too makes our action on matter more predictable. Mastering a craft does the same, actually often better than having read an article about that expert technique called crafstmanship. Most people however limit their understanding of information to the second aspect of publishing and reading an article…
So to summarise information is whatever product, service or technique that makes life more predictable for the receiver of information, some times it may be just a message in the ordinary meaning of that word but more often information comes from objects or services or techniques that are facilitating our lives in a complex and often hard to predict world…
Paul
PS: More on this on my web site.