INFO 200 Reading Response #1: Information as Thing
Note for graders: skip the introduction until the section break (denoted by ellipsis)
This article is the first of a series. Next: I200 #2
One type of assignment in my INFO 200 course this quarter is the reading response, and the assignment page for the first explicitly states “You can write these responses as documents and upload them, or you can write these responses as blog entries on a site like Medium and submit a link.” I’ll take the opportunity to write my responses on the blog.
But didn’t I say on day one that this blog was going to be for design only, and these posts aren’t about design? I did, and I have referred to this blog as my design blog to date. However, there have already been a handful of posts that were really more Informatics than HCDE, that were often events listed on the HCDE calendar. The initial purpose of my blog was to chronicle my design work, and be submitted as a supplementary material with my HCDE application. That application is due in five days, and I think it’s acceptable to now branch the blog out to include my academic pursuits more generally, rather than excluding non-design work. For now, this just means HCDE + the four other classes I’m taking this quarter, and I’ll keep my outside reading/philosophy out of the equation for now. Here’s my first intentionally non-design post.
Paper: Information as Thing (Buckland 1991)
According to Buckland, what are the three principal uses of the term ‘information’ and how do they differ from each other? As you explain the differences between the three uses, provide an example of each from your own life.
The answer to this question is probably best constructed using the table at the bottom of page 352:
Information-as-Process
Information-as-process descibes an intangible process. The process is informing one or more others; the intangible is that no physical document, or data, is created to do so. Instead, it must be done verbally. Conversation is a general example of this.
This one is certainly the strangest to me, as I don’t know how one could actually use the word “information” as a verb, in a sentence, to represent this. I understand that verbal communication may be the most common way to derive value from information — to inform — but I was under the impression that the paper aimed to represent three different definitions of the same word, and “inform” seems like a better word here.
The personal example that most readily comes to mind is when I heard the news that Kobe Bryant had died. I was sitting and talking with a small group on the bench at Sunday futsal when someone saw the news on their phone and told us, which is information-as-process.
Information-as-Knowledge
Information-as-knowledge just means the knowing of something. Everything you can recall in an empty room by yourself, with no documents (information-as-thing) to assist you.
Basic “encyclopedia-style” facts fall into this category. In fourth grade, we were required to learn every country & capital in the world and place them on a map. This type of recall was formerly highly prized in various levels of education, but has since become relatively obsolete as computing (and search) make these tasks easy. Instead, the ability to use information-as-knowledge for greater purposes (critical thinking, problem solving) have become a priority.
Information-as-Thing
Information-as-thing is the tangible, entity-based form of information. It’s simply the same stuff someone possesses as information-as-knowledge, but recorded in some physical or digital form to give it semipermanence. While Buckland spends most of the paper laying out his own preferred taxonomy for this category, the important part is just understanding that this is most of what we see and use every day now.
A cheeky example is to note that much of what used to be information-as-process — professors lecturing on information to a live audience — has now been replaced by either documents or recorded lectures, which blend into an unclear category between there and here. On the one hand, they’re verbal, but on the other, they also exist physically in a file format, giving them permanence.
To assert a more cut-and-dried example, this article itself is information-as-thing.
Overall, I am largely confused by the necessity of these major distinctions. I acknowledge that this would probably be different if I had academic research experience in the field, as research often necessitates extremely specific defintions for concepts that may be intuitively understood already. I consider this an extreme of “making the familiar strange, and the strange familiar” — knowing information and informing others is something humans do naturally, beginning at an extremely young age, without having to read Buckland first.
In our increasingly digital age, I believe the lines between information-as-knowledge and information-as-thing become dim. In many situations, having the knowledge of the existence of some source of information-as-thing is often the most practical and effective way to know of it. I would argue that it is most effective to know how to find the capital of any particular country, rather than knowing them on your own.
I also find it surprising that this paper would be influential as late as 1991. To me, and perhaps this is a manifestation of my upbringing as a digital native, the concept of information-as-thing seems self-evident, and nothing worth writing a paper about. I am curious to know how much of a debate this might have been at the time.
If I could rewrite the major categories, I think I would try to consider different parameters entirely. I think it more important to distinguish between, say, inferred information vs. observed, or other distinctions of source validity, etc. I just don’t believe that information in the head vs. world is a very meaningful or bright line. If I have information in my head, it’s almost certain that somewhere else, that information already exists. If I learned it from somewhere, it’s already information-as-thing before it becomes my knowledge. And in order for it to become information-as-thing, it was already someone else’s knowledge. The relatively few things people know that aren’t from information-as-thing could be things they were told by others, like their parents growing up — information-as-knowledge. However, the teller got their information from somewhere, and again, it either already existed or it was their own original thought. It seems to me then that the important distinction must be between information that existed already, and information that was inferred. Known information, whether it exists at any given point in time as knowledge, process, or thing, is the same information and can be passed along over time. That’s why I don’t think the categories are especially distinct, so overall, I’m not a huge fan of the paper. I think I’m missing some element (like participation in research) that would give me a better appreciation for Buckland’s theory.
