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.

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