β Scribed by Schwartz, Candy
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
Michael Buckland's (1991) essay on "Information as Thing" was interesting but reinforces the disturbing idea of including objects that communicate information within a definition of information. Buckland examines many things that convey information (books, documents, museum artifacts, trees, and so on) and says they are information. He finally concludes: "We are unable to say confidently of anything that it could not be information." He admits that a set consisting of everything in the universe does little to define it and allows that informationas-thing is secondary to information-as-process, But he persists in developing a thesis based on the idea that things that inform are themselves information.
A tree may be many things, a source of lumber, a home for birds, a biological factory; but it is not information. Books may be many things, but they are not information. Data about trees and books may be stored and retrieved, but we are not storing and retrieving information.
Bernier was right. Information resides, not in the object, but in the receiver. It is a change in the central nervous system (Bernier & Yerkey, 1979, p. 18); a change in the knowledge, beliefs, values, or behavior of a person from an encounter with data.
Fairthorne (1965) was right. The word "information" is no more than a linguistic convenience that saves people the trouble of thinking about what they are talking about. He was also right when he said that, if we put our minds to it, we can "avoid the word information and say what we mean." Buckland's "information-as-things" are simply books, documents, text, surrogates, objects, events, and data. Informative? Yes. Things? Yes. Information? No.
What difference does it make? In a gem of an essay on the place of humans in information systems, Boland (1987) warned that entifying information leads us to believe our task is complete if we can hand the system user a "thing." It denies the problem of engaging in dialogue to make sense of the world. It removes humans from the information systems environment and makes them an unnecessary element of the information age. Information is meaning and can only be gotten through dialogue in a human community, not with something cranked out of a computer like objects coming off an assembly line.
Although it was undoubtedly not Buckland's intention to do so, the persistent tone of "information-as-thing" entifies that which should not be an entity, causing it to lose its power as it loses its dependence on the human mind. Buckland was right in saying these things should be studied to find the best ways to store and retrieve them. We cannot develop effective information systems by ignoring the sources of information. But by substituting "information-as-thing"
for information, we destroy the possibility of the type of human community that information systems professionals are responsible for upholding (Boland, 1987, p. 371).
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