What is Information?
People say that we live in a time where we are feeling anxious or overwhelmed because “we have too much information.” I find that to be a rather misleading way to frame the situation.
First of all, what is information anyway?
Here’s a simple way to think about it. Imagine standing in a field of absolute whiteness, as an invisible person. I’m talking about the absence of the slightest of grey. Nothing but absolute whiteness all around you. Can you imagine what that would be like? Personally, I think it would be utterly confusing due to the absence of any information.
Now imagine an absolutely black dot appearing in front of you amidst the absolute whiteness. All of a sudden, you will be presented with information.
With that visual in mind, here’s the question.
What do you think is the information?
Is it the color black?
The shape of the dot?
The answer, as far as I’m concerned, is neither.
To me, the information is the contrast[1] between the black dot and the absolute whiteness.
I say this, because I’ve come to believe that we say we “have information” when we feel we can confidently make a choice from a set of given or implied alternatives.
It is in the fact that I can now confidently choose between the black dot and the absolute whiteness where I can confirm the existence of information.
Back in 2007, I was inspired by my mentor to write and produce a short animation to illustrate this [2]
In hindsight, what I didn’t emphasize enough in the video is the part about confidence. It’s easy to ignore the emotional component, but without the emotional component there will be no choice, just options.
I’m sure we’ve all had the experience of having a number of options for lunch, without any one of them inspiring us to confidently make a choice. This necessity of emotion in choice was famously explored in the book “Descartes’ Error,” written by neuroscientist Antonio Damassio.
When we perceive an absolute black dot in an absolute white space as an invisible person, we can say that the contrast gives us the confidence to choose between paying attention to the black or the white. Thus, we can, as I did above, be tempted to say that the moment we notice the contrast, we have information.
Yet, mere contrast is not always sufficient for us to make a confident choice.
Let us return to the notion that we live in a time where we are anxious or feeling overwhelmed because “we have too much information.”
When you surf the Web for articles, do you notice contrasts between the authors’ writings? I do. Is the mere contrast enough for you to make confident choices? Not for me. At least not always. In fact, sometimes I feel so overwhelmed or anxious with mere contrasts that I have difficulty making confident choices.
In other words, if having information is what allows us to make confident choices, then we can say that the feeling of anxiety or being overwhelmed does not only connote that “we have too much information.” It also connotes that we are missing information.
Does that sound like a paradox to some of you?
If it does, then it’s because you’re missing information right now.
Let me explain.
I want you to remember the analogy of the black dot.
When we say that an invisible person in an absolute white space feels confident in choosing between an absolute black dot and an absolute white space, we are assuming a particular context.
The assumption is that the invisible person values the ability to choose between a black dot and a white space.
As an invisible person immersed in white space, it’s conceivable that the ability to choose between a black dot and a white space is of value. But as I browse the Web for articles, what I value is something quite different. [3]
So unless the choice I’m able to make given the contrast is valuable to me, it probably means that the contrast is irrelevant to what I’m trying to do. In other words, it may feel as if it makes no difference whether the contrast existed or not.
So here’s the missing information.
Information is that which gives one the ability to confidently make a choice from a set of given or implied alternatives to achieve a goal one perceives to be of value.
A renowned polymath Gregory Bateson famously summarized this in poetic form as follows:
What we mean by information is a difference which makes a difference.[4]
It makes no difference how many different puzzle pieces you collect. What makes a difference is collecting the puzzle pieces that complete your puzzle.
So, no, we don’t only feel overwhelmed or anxious because we live in a time where “we have too much information.” We feel overwhelmed or anxious because we live in a time, where despite all these stimulations that provoke our anxiety and overwhelm, we are still missing information.
If you consider yourself a shaper of our future, I challenge you to help us have information instead of merely stimulating us to anxiety and overwhelm.
[1] If you have ever taken a class in traditional darkroom photography, you may have heard people talk about a piece of developed photograph lacking in information. That basically means there’s not enough contrast.
[2] My mentor is a man named “Peter Lucas.” It was my conversation with him that I was inspired to write and produce the animation on “What is information?” To be clear, the fabrication of the animation was done by another colleague. It was thanks to my colleague, the animation won the AIGA 365 award.
[3] In other words, information is relational. One person’s treasure is another person’s trash.
[4] Form, Substance, and Difference by Gregory Bateson
Photo Credit: Thomas Leuthard at http://bit.ly/2Gdbo7y
