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A brief history of information (part 2)

Ted Byfield continues his series of articles looking at the history of the word "information". To quote:

In the centuries of use before its modern redefinition, as we've seen in Part 1, "information" had already toted up a formidable list of ambiguities. For example, it's an action in some usages and a thing in others, it's both singular and plural, and it's both an informal assertion of fact as well as a procedure for making a formal statement.

These slippery qualities made "information" a very amenable candidate as cybernetics pioneer Claude Shannon (and others) sought to name their developing, doubly negative idea of the reduction of uncertainty. They also seem to have made the word resistant to efforts to fix it with a precise or stable new meaning. So, in addition to its long-standing contradictory substance, Shannon's efforts added still more paradoxical attributes: information became something abstract yet measurable, significant but not meaningful, and, last but not least, present wherever communication occurs but is nowhere to be found.

Posted by jamesr on January 11, 2007 12:39 PM
Categories: Information management, Knowledge management