Written by Mel Reichler and Tom Surprenant

Copyright 2002

Chapter 1

Introduction

The trick is not to start the ball rolling but to get out of the way

Human culture, every human culture, depends on information and the mechanisms humans have developed for handling information, like symbols. But to modern societies which are evolving into super electronic, digital and technological worlds, information is absolutely central.

Information seems to have taken on a life of its own; it has its own priesthood, rituals, rites and secret passwords. In modern societies information has consumed culture by becoming a culture unto itself. But we only see this when we shake loose from the pragmatics of information, when we resist putting information to any practical use.

Information lay virtually invisible in the world, camouflaged by everyday activities until there was a technological structure providing virtually unlimited material for its growth. Now that modern science and technology have revealed its hidden aspects, we are recasting our understanding of information. Our times not only require an expanded science of information but they need and demand a sociology, a psychology, a political economy and a philosophy of information also.

We marvel at the science of astronomy because of the ability of astronomers to track the discovery of our universe to its beginnings. Yet the search for our origins pales when compared with the discovery of information because information makes possible the discovery of other peoples universes as well. And, of course, we are not dealing with the origin of the universe but with information about its origin. Only information has made this science possible at all.

It was only with the development of the printing press that information broke out of the strangle hold of a limited set of priests and began to affect culture in a direct and significant way. Since the technique of easy reproduction of information was invented an entire new series of universes has been revealed.

Every change in the technology of information produces radial shifts in the way human beings exist on earth. Digital information is creating a paradigm shift as it becomes more prevalent in the culture.

What has changed about information to allow us to speak of an information revolution?

•The amount of information has increased enormously.

The sheer quantity of information available is overwhelming. In part, this is because

•The way information is processed has changed.

The invention of the computer has changed the way we manipulate information. This processing has changed

•The speed at which information moves.

Information moves at light speed, not foot speed or ship speed. We have the capacity to manage and sift through mountains of information today. One of the consequences of this is that

•The distribution of information has changed.

Physical space is no longer a constraint on information. Information is distributed to people instantaneously and available anywhere. The effects of this is that

•Information takes new forms.

Information which before was limited to books and written documents now is given a confusing variety of forms. The digitalization of information has completely altered

The way information is manipulated and stored. The memory of the species has changed. As our memory has changed, our existence as agents in the world has changed. Information has changed the entities for which it is information.

Chapter 2

Information and common sense

Somewhere between WWII and the Gulf War, between Univac , the IBMPC and the internet, the world stopped making sense.

It stopped making sense because science and technology changed radically: and economics and politics were completely transformed; and social life altered totally. But common sense did not change.

Common sense— the kernel of knowledge on which we depend to make sense of all of the rest of what we know— did not change at all. Like some tiny, prehistoric animal caught in an antediluvian tar pit, it stopped moving, then it collapsed and shriveled and sank in the mud.

In the years between Univac and the Internet, common sense fossilized— turned into stone. Inaccessible and impenetrable, common sense stopped doing what common sense is supposed to do; make the world casually available; Make what is happening in the world as clear as the nose on your face, as obvious as two and two are four.

We need a new common sense. We really do.

Common sense on common sense

Common sense is universal and it is reflexive. What do we learn when we put common sense to work understanding itself, understanding common sense?

Common sense informs us that common sense is how we think about the world when we are not thinking about it or thinking about how we think about it. Common sense understands itself to be the reasoning we use when we are not formally reasoning about the world. Commonsensically, we recognize common sense right away, fresh out of the box. And we recognize common sense also by its absence, when someone is not using it. To common sense, common sense processing of information seems to be the level of reasoning that a switch uses when it turns a light on — none. Put simply, common sense does not have a clue about what common sense is.

It takes more than common sense to recognize that common sense is a profound form of reasoning. If this seems to be an exaggeration to you, if it seems to be making a mountain out of a molehill, think about a computer. Understanding that if a person goes into a restaurant and then later pay his bill is obvious he ate something, is not an idea that occurs naturally to a computer. A computer has to be cajoled and encouraged and really helped into making the inference that if two deaf mutes are having a conversation they are using sign language. Of course this means that a computer is not likely as we are to be prejudiced, believe in magic, or have a compulsion to gamble. A computer lacks the commonest of common sense.

Common sense consists of the natural power of reasoning that emerges when human beings are brought up in human society. Both of these elements are necessary. It is not enough to be one of us biologically, a member of the species. Biology is not enough for common sense. In addition to being born human we must be raised human; we must be human in a second sense. It is the interaction of these two fundamental elements of being human that produces common sense.

Common sense is so much our birthright that we take it for granted, so fundamental that we do not know what it is that we know. We know someone is using common sense because they are seeing the world just as it obviously is. Common sense presents the world instantaneously, naturally, seemingly without any mediation at all. Common sense appears to us as recognizing the world for what it is. The judgments someone using common sense makes are those that seem evident in the world, which correspond to what is obviously present in the world.

Common sense is a very complex form of reasoning about the world. Common sense tells us what we are seeing as we are seeing it. It gives us an immediate interpretation of anything we encounter in the world. How does it do this?

Here is an interpretation of how common sense works, not all of it but a significant part. Common sense gets its power from a coherent, organizing image that brings the world into focus. At the heart of common sense is a picture —a model or metaphor— that we use to make sense out of the world. We use this model to represent the world to ourselves. The key to a new common sense is a vital, new, controlling image: the new image is information.

Every metaphor provides a template against which reality can be aligned. Every metaphor is a map of the unknown.

Common sense makes sense of the world by using a model of what the world is like to process our perceptions. Common sense anticipates— pre-processes— the world before we perceive it. And common sense adjusts and modifies our perceptions of the world after we have had our look-see-listen- hear at the world, to correct our perceptions.

Common sense continuously corrects our picture of the world. Common sense works like a pair of 3 D glasses for our understanding. Through the two lenses of these glasses common sense draws the world in. It uses the image at its center in two ways.

First it uses the image as a frame, a backdrop, like a movie screen on which a picture has been painted. Common sense projects the world on the image at its center. This image furnishes a background against which the world we live in becomes discernible to us; it puts a frame around the world for us. Against this background, by some contrast only common sense perceives, our world becomes visible.

Then common sense uses the metaphor at its center in a different way. It lays this image, like a transparency, over our perceptions This overlay provides us with a virtual image of what we are going to see before we see it. By aligning a constant, complete image with our shifting, always piecemeal perceptions of reality, common sense shows us the hidden, unrecognized set of connections that exist in our world. The image at the heart of common sense acts like a map revealing the camouflaged and obscured connections between things. This projection completes our partial and always incomplete perceptions of the world.

It is common sense that recognizes the deep structures that exist in the world.

Chapter 3

Chronocentricity:

Every generation is chronocentric. Each generation believes that its time is different from all times that preceded it. Sometimes this Chronocentricity turns out to be true. Is it true for us? Is our time really different from other times?

Our times are different, truly different from almost all other times in human history.

Some think not: They believe our times are merely a quickened past, an intensification and exaggeration of the kind of change that people have experienced in most generations before us. They believe we are making a defining moment out of a moment merely because it is ours.

They are wrong. Our time is different, truly different from almost all other times in human history. Our times are more than an intensification of change. It is not only that all of the changes in information are focused, that all of these changes are coming together, It is not simply that they are mutually reinforcing, compressed and self accelerating. There is something else happening.

In one sense the changes in information are merely an index, a convenient set of markers which tag the transformation we are experiencing. The changes which register as change in information are changing not merely the way we deal with the world, they are changing our spirit and our substance: our needs, desires, our impulses and the way we think. They are not merely the development of new tools; they are changing the tool maker and the tool user. They are changing and will change our substance individually and the form of the collective system we make up, The best way to think of this is that we are self evolving into something different from the humans before us. It is evolution as definite and identifiable as the change from proto human into homo sapiens. We are self creating a new creature and a new species.

The way things are connected to other things is new; the kinds of systems we are forming is different.

The speed, and density and dependability — the tightness — of connections that we are seeing between social groups were only possible between elements of an organism before. Our social groups are woven more tightly connected than even some organisms were before. For the first time every social system is potentially directly connectible both to its own parts and to the other systems which make up its context. Simultaneously, organic wholes are being broken apart, separated in ways they could not be separated before. Organ transplants are the most visible token of this new separability.

We are intervening in our world’s natural processes in a way that has never been done before. We are burrowing into ourselves and nature in new ways. We are intervening in our own reproduction processes, leaping to reproduce and modify the natural processes that govern energy creation at the heart of suns. We are insinuating ourselves closer to the center of the natural processes than ever before.

Where every other generation tried to imitate and dominate nature we are learning how to modify and co-opt natural processes. We are shifting, blending and transforming nature.

We feel these changes in different ways. Much of the novelty we recognize as disorienting our lives flow from these fundamental changes. Belief, which was always an occupation for the very few—for lawyers, politicians, intellectuals and saints—, has become an avocation and an entertainment. Individuals have the leisure to believe anything. Belief is no longer connected to survival but has become a matter of a style of life To be believed, a statement doesn’t have to be true only usable in some argument or debate. Every fact is a resource for status, a chip in some power game.

Any particular fact has become disputable and defensible. Any combination of facts is arguable, any theoretical argument tenable. There is a data base for every conviction, a spreadsheet for each creed.

In the end of course, science and common sense refutes, rejects, and denies. The world is what is actual, not what is possible; The world is not what would be nice for it to be but what it is. Not every argument is true; some alleged facts are false.

But while we scrap about fractions of truth, dispute each interpretation of a possibility, we thrash in a limbo of uncertain virtual realities. While we wait for the truth to sort itself out, we become bored with distinctions, indifferent to claims of truth. It doesn’t matter who is right or which party is telling the truth. There is no chance of really knowing. Falsehood believed with conviction is just as good as truth badly argued. The only difference between two facts is how well they are asserted. The only difference between two ideologies is the price of defending them; the only difference between two creeds is the price of believing. This is the cost of living in our time.

The intellectual and scientific version of this disorder is the theory of chaos and complexity. Reflexively we are studying our experience and developing the formalisms and frameworks necessary to understand it. Our times are really different.

One way of understanding this is to recognize that some times are evolutionary, some are revolutionary; ours are both. Two interwoven lines of development are occurring simultaneously but in different dimensions. We are simultaneously changing in two different ways simultaneously. On one line we are going about the business of living as every generation before us went about the business of living. We are raising children, planning careers, adapting and adjusting. The changes we are making in this line are what makes us appear like the generations before us. But at the same time we are fundamentally altering every aspect of human life: we are altering the life we are living as we go about living it. The details of each of these processes seem to have a natural place in the other. We are plausibly doing the impossible.

Chapter 4

Changes and Connections

“The world is different now; it has changed completely” a voice states bluntly. Since when?” we want to know. “Since the last time you looked, whenever that was,” comes the reply.

The world is changing before our eyes. In the years between Univac and the IBMPC and the internet, many new inventions changed the world. But new inventions are not the main reason the world is different. What has really transformed the world are new connections between things.

Information is a guide to the connections between things.

The couplings between things have changed even where the things connected have not changed at all. New links have been forged between old things; Old relationships between things have been transformed. Changing connections between things are responsible for the radical change of the world.

•Where there was one connection now there are a

multiplicity.

The feedback loops have multiplied in the world; Everything has been connected to everything else.

•The speed at which communication travels over connections     has increased drastically.

That which took weeks before, takes minutes or seconds now. The interaction between ourselves and everything else in the world has speeded up.

• Indirect connections between the things have become direct.

Before we worked through inherited, natural connections. Today we intervene directly. Before, we bred our animals in real time through the natural routines of sex and birth. Now, bypassing the crude but dependable natural processes, we intervene directly by modifying genes in human time.)

Our connection to the very basic physical, biological and psychological processes which sustain us has changed. This rapid evolution of connections has changed the world thoroughly and completely.

Behind our own backs, we and the world have evolved into a new kind of system.

Chapter 5

Our old common sense

Our old common sense absorbed the world we lived in and transformed it into a kind of logic. Whenever people confronted the challenge of making sense out of something that was complex and organized like the groups and societies they belonged to, or the universe they lived in, they turned to common sense for a hint. And common sense suggested that this puzzling complex organization was like some type of machine, a simple machine like a clock or a complicated machine like an organism. The image of the machine was at the center of the old common sense.

When people tried to make sense out of the societies they lived in, the image common sense provided was the familiar, complicated machine that is the body. When people tried to make sense out of the social systems they lived in, the groups and societies they were a part of, common sense said, “these groups and societies are social organisms just like the body which is a physical organism. It’s as clear as the nose on your face.” When the universe itself challenged human beings to make sense out of it, common sense whispered “the universe is just like a big machine. It works like a big clock.” Common sense suggested that the parts of mysterious complex entities humans encountered were like the gears and levers of a clock, or like the arms and legs and a brain of a person.

Before Univac and the IBMPC and the Internet, people used images of some kind of machine when they wanted to call attention to the fact that a piece of the world was organized and whole. At the center of the old common sense were the dual images of clock and the organism. As a matter of common sense, both variations of the model of the machine— the clock and the organism— convey the essential idea of systemness, of a complex of interdependent parts whose interconnection is central to their function.

Through the metaphor of the machine, common sense asserts that the parts that make up a whole behave differently when they are connected to one another than when they are separated. In these images of simple or complex machines —clocks and organisms— common sense finds plain-on-the-nose-on your-face support for the perception that it is only when things are put together properly that any whole can function at all. Both of these images insist on the centrality and indispensability of arrangement and organization; both identify organization as a key to the way the world realizes itself.

The image of the complicated machine—the organism— intensifies the clock’s idea of a complete wholeness by adding the idea of self regulation and levels. The conception of a part whose function is the regulation of some aspects of the organism as a whole becomes obvious in the brain of every animal. And with the transformation of the organism into a metaphor for wholeness and organization, the notion of levels emerges clearly also.

Even the young boy who pulls the wings off a butterfly understands the notion of sub-systems of an organism. The idea that pieces combine with other pieces to form bigger parts— subsystems— which combine with other parts (subsystems) hierarchically to make up the organism imposes itself on our thoughts about wholes. The notion of levels emerges as we think about systems as if they were organisms.

Clock and organism set up the ground rules about how we can think about wholeness in the world. They establish what kinds of wholeness can exist in the world as a matter of common sense, how we should understand what being complete (as an obvious property of things) means.

Until the IBMPC and the Internet, wholeness and self regulation was enough for the metaphor at the center of common sense. It is not enough anymore.

Chapter 6

Entropy enlarged

Since Univac and the IBMPC and the Internet, the world has become less coherent, more filled with randomness— altogether less intelligible.

It is not simply the fact that the negative aspects of the world have multiplied, not merely the eruption of a senseless violence that has invaded nursery and school. It is not a matter of independence dissolving into homelessness, not even the flash fracturing of continents that has diminished the intelligibility of the world. It is not a matter of negatives empowered and enlarged. Overwhelmingly positive changes have had the same disorienting consequences.

The bending and roughing up of social distinction and hierarchy in the name of empowering the dispossessed—minorities, gays, women, the disabled, the newly arrived— has contributed a full measure of disorientation. The rationalization and re‑engineering of the multinational corporation with its corresponding reinterpretation of work and career has contributed to the general decline in the sense of meaningfulness in the world. And the wave of scientific developments, the computer and genetic engineering, has made the conviction that the world can be understood nearly untenable.

Almost every change had disorganized our understanding and confounded our common sense. It is not the world in its rare and exotic moments that has become bewildering. It is the normal world, the everyday, boring, tedious, humdrum, ordinary world that has become almost unintelligible. Our common sense says that in the future, as things get better they will start to make more sense. It is not true. The better things get, the less sense they will make.

In the future, the faster we run the further we will get left behind: the more we achieve, the less we will accomplish. The world is no longer a sensible place. Our world has become opaque and inexplicable.

There has been a basic change in the logic of things.

It is not the scale or scope of changes that has sucked meaning from the world. What has changed is the logic of things. The new symmetries of the world outstrip our capacity to make sense out of them. Using the models of machines, of clock and organism, common sense cannot make sense out of the new logic that is beginning to dominate the world.

The un-intelligibility of the world is not the world’s fault. It is the fault of the mechanism we use to make sense out of it. It is common sense’s fault. Common sense is exhausted and used up.

Chapter 7

Why things don’t make sense anymore.

The clock and organism models turn out to be variations on the same themes. They recast, redecorate the same figures and patterns.

There are differences between the clock as a simple machine and the organism as a complicated one. Whereas the parts of a clock —as any mechanism—retain their coherence and individual states of existence when someone takes the clock apart— when the whole they comprise is disassembled— the parts of an organism decay and spoil when the whole which they make up dies. When they are amputated from the body they make up, the appendages and organs of an organism retain for a while their character as parts. Their form persists. They degrade slowly. The ability to function is often restorable or repairable. For organisms, the idea of limited independence, of a constrained existence of the parts that make up the whole is still a reasonable notion.

Common sense tells us that if the whole is disassembled the parts retain their essential existence.

To our old common sense, if the whole is more than the sum of its parts it is not much more.

The box of gears on the watchmaker’s desk provides proof of the conclusion our old common sense draws from these metaphors for systems. But in the world we live today, the idea of the independent existence of parts, the even-partial separability of parts from whole they make up is just false.

The parts of modern systems only exist as parts of the systems they compose. Apart from this whole they make up they shed the costumes we recognize them by. Separated from this system, they have only a virtual, mock existence.

The box of gears, some broken, some worn, on the clock maker’is desk represents old systems.

There are no gears in the modern watchmaker’s box of gears.

Chapter 8

New systems

A new image will convey what modern systems are about.

The clock; Imagine a ticking, traditional looking, clock with a transparent face. Hands revolve telling time. We can see, behind revolving hands and the face, gears and springs. A familiar, sensible, commonsensical, clock. Take the mechanism out of the case and take the clock apart. Suppose, as each piece is taken out of the machine— each gear, each lever, each spring and rod— it changed into instructions for making the part. Imagine that when you took the clock apart you did not get parts of a clock— you did not get the gears and springs visible when the clock was working— what you got as you pulled each part out of the whole it made up were—instructions for how to make the spring, make the gear.

This is a description of the modern digital clock which has chips for gears and levers and springs, diodes for a face, and moving patterns of light for hands. Now, reassemble this strange clock. Imagine that as the instruction for how to make each part is connected to the instructions for how to make other parts, as each set of instructions is reinserted into the whole from which it was taken, the instructions change back into the part itself.

This is a picture of the systems that make up the world in which we live. The new systems in the world carry the principle of the development of organisms to its full extent;

There are no parts separate from the system they make up. The parts of a system only exist as parts of the system when they are put together; When the system is disassembled, the parts no longer have an independent existence as parts. They change into something quite different.

What is the significance of this? We are the parts of the groups, or the social systems we make up. Inside these systems we are different from what we are outside of the systems. When we leave these systems we loose the existence we had within them and become something quite different.

We have not quite recognized the consequences of this fact. As we belong to more and more systems as we are linked to more and more systems, we are ourselves becoming multiple sets of differences, becoming and changing as we enter and exit different systems. In a sense this has always been true. But as the systems, we are part of become more like the digital and less like the mechanical watch, we ourselves are subtly changing. We are becoming more like instructions for selves than independent, coherent beings.

Chapter 9

Old Metaphors and New Systems

The old metaphors, the clock and the organism no longer provide us with an appropriate invisible template that lets us grasp and manipulate the new systems that have come into existence.

Common sense which embodies the old metaphors of clock and organism no longer lets us move effortlessly around the world we live in, seeing what is there to see, knowing what have to know, no longer lets us navigate our familiar world casually.

The old metaphors no longer provide us with a map to the hidden territories in which we dwell, to the mysteries of the world we circumnavigate.

The old metaphors of clock and organism, no longer let common sense map the chaotic buzz of the world onto a felt, organized constellation which is always present but never visible. The world we live in is, like the new digital clock, a whole with virtual parts.

The world is changing. We need a new common sense with a new image at its center, a new metaphor for grasping the changed connections between things, a metaphor which will make the new logic at the center of the everyday world, the new symmetries that characterize our world sensible, plain as the nose on our face.

The image at the heart of a new emerging common sense is information.

To the new common sense that is materializing, to the common sense with information at its center, it makes perfect sense that any system, any whole, when disassembled, does not break into the parts that are apparent and obvious when you look at the system when it is operating.

The parts of any system come into existence only when the whole comes into being: They exist only as long as the whole exists. Wholes and parts mutually determine one another. More, they mutually enable, empower and manifest one another.We need a new metaphor, a new tag and a new image for a new common sense. Information is that metaphor. The common sense which will develop around that metaphor will define our times.

That common sense will tell us that the parts of our modern world cannot be thought about as gears or limbs, the whole cannot be conceived of, or felt as if it was an assemblage of gears or limbs or subsystems of an organism. The most real of our systems, the most tangible of them are spook systems, virtual systems. Treating them as if they were some sort of a machine —a clock or an organism— is a misunderstanding of what the world is about and reduces our ability to deal with them. This is the message of the new common sense.

Chapter 10

Why now, why information, why me?

There is a long answer to these questions and a short one. The long answer traces the development and interaction of science and technology and economics and social organization from the middle ages to yesterday. The short answer is the computer.

Before the computer only animals processed information. No machine‑‑ no matter how complex‑‑ could generate, produce, process and act on information. For the first time in human experience we have developed a machine which processes information.

Many people are not impressed with computers because they compare their ability to process information to human capacities for processing information. In that comparison, the machines fall short. It is the wrong comparison. We should be comparing the computer to stones, to bridges, to steam engines, to bacteria or paramecium. What we should notice is the fact that for the first time a device can work with information the way humans work with information.

This means also that machines can control other machines the way we control other human beings — on the basis of information. Information is coming to the fore because physical systems are being called into being by information. Physical systems are assembled in the real world by information. Machines are being connected to one another by information managed by computers.

It is important to be clear about what this means.

It means that pieces of machinery are being connected to one another by information links rather than rods and pulleys. Systems are being managed and controlled by information. The links that connect one machine to another are information links, established by communication, controlled by computers.

Information is substituting for physical connections, for rods, levers and pulleys. The physical connections between things are controlled, organized and held in place by digital communication connections, by messages.

Physical systems — machinery, devices, factories — are becoming like intimate groups, like conversations.

So what: What difference does all of this make?

So: People are being separated and divorced from their actions. This separation of agent from agency is taking place rapidly. Human beings are acting nowadays by calling forth demons and wizards— byte sized chunks of computer programs‑‑ which scurry out along networks and carry out the requests of computer users by turning machines on and off.

So what? So, in the past humans beings had to babysit their machines. Without a human being directly guiding it, a machine stopped. The most complicated machine failed unless a human being guided, supplemented its action. That is no longer true. The action in the world is being done by computers and computer controlled machines. Humans control things by setting computers in motion.

So what? So, frequently we do not know exactly what these demonic apprentices are doing, how that are accomplishing the tasks we are setting them doing. We care about and control only the output. Humans have lost control of the processes by which their desires are realized, the way their needs are satisfied. Increasingly, we are not setting up processes which accomplish the ends we desire. More and more we are implementing processes‑which‑determine‑the‑processes that determine the outcome we want. We regulate the action of these invisible, communication agents by indicating how well the output corresponds to what we want.

The level of human control has shifted up a level. We have more power but less control. We have been pushed further back in the chain of command.

One consequence of this is that almost nothing is fixed in our world. The work we need done is accomplished by virtual organizations called forth to carry out the job. These organizations only live only as long as the job takes. They take their shape from the task that needs to be done. Afterward, they dissolve and other organizations are put in their place. Virtual teams, temporary alliances are put together on the spot and dissolved after they have done their work.

Information is the metaphor and model that makes sense out of the world. The characteristics of information are becoming the characteristics of the world around us. The greater degree of connectedness the computer provides, the directness of computer connection, the density of connections, the fact that feedback loops are multiplying, that everything influences everything else instantaneously has made the world itself like information.

Chapter 11

A Perspective on information

The next few Chapters may seem like nonsense. It isn’t so. Think about this:

If you want to dream, you must first go to sleep. You must shut out the routine common sense, rational thinking of everyday life. You can’t see a movie if the management keeps the lights on in the theater. To see images on the screen the lights that let you find your seat must be shut off. You can only see the stars when the light of the sun is removed. The light of a single close sun overwhelms the light of galaxies of suns further away.

Seeing some things keep you from seeing others: knowing some things keeps you from knowing others. As the examples of dreaming, watching a movie and seeing the stars make clear, this is a practical matter. There is nothing esoteric or mystical about it. To see the point that this Chapter is making you have to block out exactly the light that you need to maneuver around the everyday world, to put on your underwear, to drive to the mall. Practically this means that if you want to understand what we are talking about you are just going to give up some of the very rational very intelligent, very commonsensical ideas that you use to make sense out of the everyday world you live in. Nothing mysterious. It is just that: you can’t look at the movie we are projecting if you keep staring at the old, flickering, silent movie that is showing in the movie theater in your head.

It’s not the fact that the world doesn’t make sense that confuses us, it’s the fact that the sense it makes doesn’t make sense.

Information has exploded as a practical reality. It is crouching, poised to spring out as the key conceptual tool for the 1990’s and beyond. Information is becoming the shared framework for understanding social and personal transactions, the foundation shared by art and science. Like the mechanical clock and the organism before it, information is becoming the common metaphor for comprehending the world.

Chapter 12

Assumptions About Information

The new common sense will reform itself around the image of information as a pearl takes shape around a grain of sand. But before this can happen the conception of information must be clarified and refined.

Our current understanding of information is based on several outmoded assumptions about information.

•We assume for instance that information is attached to the world at both ends.

•We assume that information is about something.

•We assume that information was produced by someone for someone, that it goes somewhere and that someone receives it.

Like most of men’s assumptions about women and parent’s assumptions about children, these assumptions are no longer true. They have not been true since Univac and the IBMPC and the Internet.

We can no longer assume, for instance, that information is attached to facts about the world. Things are changing so quickly that by the time most information is produced, transmitted and received the facts the information represent no longer exist. Most information floats free from the world.

Nor can we assume that information originates in human action, or is produced by human beings for human beings. Much information, broadcast helter skelter by routers, over networks by automatic dialers via fax machines, goes everywhere and ends up nowhere in particular; Blended with desire and displaced, mis-remembered facts, it is sucked into the black holes of personal information managers and do lists or lost in disconnected or broken telecommunication devices. It is discarded and read by no one, or spewed into the hands and minds of people for whom it becomes golden noise, who misread it. And increasingly, the information we are struggling desperately to make sense out of is created , collected and organized by computers, not people. Not only are computers the source of considerable information but they are its intended target as well. Captured by a human beings, much information is unintelligible gibberish. We can no longer assume that information is attached to humans at either its origin or its destination.

Besides the direct assumptions we make about information there are assumptions about the rest of the world that we casually apply to information because we believe it belongs to that world, that information can be treated as an object in the world, out there, a thing like other things. While many of these assumptions might be true it is certain that many of them will turn out to be false; that what holds for much of the world does not hold for information. For instance, we believe that given a closed system we cannot take out of the system more than we put into it. Yet as far as information is concerned this may be false. It may be reasonable to suppose that we may constantly mine more information from a system than is contained in it. In the universe of information perpetual motion machines may exist. There is no magic in this, merely a misunderstanding about information; information is not out there. Information is a triangulation, a connection, neither here nor there.

Only human beings can squeeze into the space between information and what information is about.

Chapter 13

Data, Information, Knowledge

Data, information, and knowledge appear to be linked in a tight hierarchy. Everything starts out with data, with facts. Information is made up of pieces of data, of facts. Knowledge consists of organized information. Information cumulates and knowledge emerges.

The only thing wrong with this picture is that it misses the point. Data is data in light of information and knowledge. Information exists only in the context of knowledge and data. Knowledge exists only emersed in data and information. None of these come from one of the others: they come mutually from each other.

We have always been able to enter into circular, closed loops by making an arbitrary entry — by breaking into the loop somewhere — and making our way from there. We were, until now, always able to dissociate the whole from the parts that made the whole up, and the parts from the whole they made up and deal with each separately then put them together again. This is not longer possible. Every point has become a location on a non linear path.

Information:

Information is the middle passage between data and knowledge.

Consider that: Information comes into being only as someone, or something, becomes informed. And we know someone is informed only by how they act. The act of becoming informed cannot be achieved without information, yet information only comes into being as someone— or some device like a computer— becomes informed. Information does not exist independent of someone or something becoming informed, and potentially at least, acting.

AND (of course) . . .

A dead chicken is just a dead chicken but information about a dead chicken is something else entirely

The chicken lying dead on the supermarket counter is one thing, an anonymous dead chicken lying dead on the road it was crossing on its way to becoming a joke is quite another. But in neither of these cases should the dead chicken be confused with information about dead chickens. Information about something and the something it is information about are two different things. Information is an object displacing, value-adding experience. Without the potential for choosing, without real choice and action, there is no information; but without information there can be no action.

Information and action are intertwined and inseparable. The potential for action— even the possibility of action— liberates information. And information is necessary for even the most insignificant action. But this connection between action and information has changed.

Chapter 14

What is information?

Information is managed chaos. Whenever and wherever chaos is controlled, information appears. Chaos constrained appears as choice. That is what information is about.

What is information, really.

Information provides an actor with the potential for doing something, the possibility of choosing. What does this mean? Choice, as realizable possibility, is universally considered a measure of information. In the past it was all information was about because ‘how much’ was all we could grasp when we dealt with information. But there is of course more.

Without the potential for action, without choice, there is no information. And without information there can be no effective, or efficient, action. The circle is complete. It is also interesting that when I expand my choices in the world, I enlarge the store of information that the world contains, I increase it. As long as the choices are real then information grows!

Really, Really, what is information?

Information is not the kind of thing that is; of course that does not make it the kind of thing that isn’t either.

We can say that something ‘is’ when we can place it in time and space.

Information has no simple location in time and space. It does not even have a complicated one. Its existence is an irreducible betweeness stuck between spaces and times. It is always a relationship between action and an actor and a world in process. Like love, information is the kind of thing exists in a constant state of becoming. Information is not something that is because it is a set of connections and relationships. Like betweenness information is not anywhere.

Information is always a middle passage, a middle passage between data and knowledge, between actors or agents and their actions.

It emerges when agents and action and objects in a situation come together. It is not distinct from someone or something being informed or what it informed about.

Information comes into view only as someone acts, and becomes informed. This is the answer.

But what is the question?

How does a dead chicken get to be information about a dead chicken? How does it stay information about a dead chicken instead of becoming a television advertisement for a chicken farmer. These questions get to the essence of the matter of information becoming.

Information and uncertainty go hand in hand

Information resolves uncertainty, at least at its fundamental, or primary, level. But someone or something has to be uncertain at some time. Information is nothing more than the measure of uncertainty resolved. The more uncertain we are about something, the more a message about it informs us. The more certain we are about something, the less choice we have, the less information any message about the thing conveys.

I can know something. I can know I know it. I can know what it is I know and I can know I know that I know it.

It is also true that I can be uncertain about something and uncertain about what I am uncertain about and uncertain about my uncertainty about being uncertain. Each of these ‘knowings’ is different in the same way as data is different from information is different from knowledge. Of course, knowing something isn’t exactly the same as having information about it.

Chapter 15

Data

If information is managed chaos, data is restrained anarchy. Data is an illusion, an abstraction on information. Data is unsorted, unrelated, potential for information. Data cannot exist without being associated —from the start— with information which it makes up, which is nothing more than the organization of collections of data. Context is the key to grasping data and information is the context of data. Take away the context and you have less than an illusion of information, a shadow of a shadow. Data itself is useless. It becomes information when brandished, when it is used to strike something.

If this makes sense then you can think about this.

Information can only be communicated from person to person as a stream of data.

The ultimate irony is that only way we can communicate information is by communicating the data embedded and contained in it. While it is understood as information by the communicator it moves to the receiver as a data stream. But the receiver can only receive it tacitly, as if it were a piece of information. Data, information and knowledge are locked in an endless cycle of becoming. Data becomes information which becomes knowledge which becomes information which . . . . Knowledge is information imprisoned and data incarcerated.

Becoming is a continuous process, not a state of affairs. Data, information and knowledge are caught in the whirlwind of becoming. There are caught in a continuous blur of interconnecting change.

The path to information is always around data, not through it.

One does not get to information in a straight line. The path is always curved, always doubles back upon itself and dead ends. Data represents what is taken to be known; what is taken to be unknown but believed to be knowable is —information. Data is like a series of shoals that must be navigated. Data is always on the verge of becoming something else. Potential is not static and it does not have a place.

Chapter 16

Knowledge

Eighty percent of what is valid knowledge today was not known yesterday, and seventy percent will be forgotten tomorrow. Knowledge is information being manipulated. Knowledge which seems to be manufactured out of information is really the matrix for producing information. Knowledge is what we call the factory which produces information and data. Knowledge consists of data and information and an essential something else. What the something else is difficult to say but here is an attempt to say it: the something else is the organization of data and information, their arrangement.

While we have recognized information, as a separate existence, we have come to understand that it is as indefinite as a photon. It is only late in the twentieth century that we have come to the realization that information should be viewed in such a way. The search for absolutes is gone. The search for relative absolutes is gone. We are in the time of absolutely relative relativities, the age of nearly complete ambiguity!

Information is continuously changing and unstable; it ceaselessly alters knowledge

Which leads us to point out one of the unique attributes of man

•Give us sufficient data and we can come up with an idea about anything

To which an appropriate response is:

•Ideas change nothing in the world except the world itself.

Until recent times information was buried inside choices. No one recognized the idea for what it was, no one noticed the independent reality of information. It was the multiplication of the possibilities created by choice and the demand for rationality that focused our attention on information, that forced the individuation of information, the separation of the idea of information from choice. And it was computers with their digitalization of information that pushed us over the edge.

Once it has been received, a message repeated is noise; any collection of words is a message only once.

Chapter 17

Complaints

You may feel you have been hustled. It may seem that we promised you a world tour of information and produced a cheap, badly packaged day excursion into words.

Let us try to put your complaint into words.

WRONG, WRONG, WRONG. How can you say data and facts are illusions? Every day of our lives each of us is forced to deal with the world as it is, not the way we would like it to be. The death of someone we love, the illness of a child, being fired from a job, being sick are realities not illusions.

Data and facts belong to the world that is out there. Believing that there are no facts is a foolishness that only philosophers can afford. Believing that the data we get from the world is an illusion only works if you live in an ivory tower. The rest of us who live in the real world can’t afford the luxury of believing that. If we do, we slip on the first patch of ice on the sidewalk.

Every business is struggling to collect data on customers and sales. Every scientist in every laboratory in the world is collecting data trying to find out the facts. The Guinness book of records, the world almanac, all the spread sheets on all of the computers of the world are overflowing with data and facts.

Each of us has our essential facts about the world, facts about self, historical facts, facts about events that happened in our lives. For each of us the critical facts are unique and different. But each of us clings to the facticity of our lives. For each of us that factuality is clear and simple and definite. These facts, these data, are the substance of our lives. We know them without doubt. There is no tinge of dubiousness, no uncertainty about them.

To say that data is an illusion is just nonsense. (That is what common sense says and which is why common sense can’t make sense out of the world.)

Response

It is true that until now, only philosophers had the luxury of arguing about the facts of the world, whether there were facts that were real or out there. Now, the rest of us are drawn into that argument as a practical matter.

The changes the computer has wrought in sensing the world, in manufacturing facts, in compiling and organizing the world has very practically changed the nature of facts in the world.

Can we escape from the factuality of the world?

Facts are, in common sense view, what is true about the world At any given time we can describe the world. The description that makes sense consists of just the facts of the world.

So the facts that the roof leaks, that my wife’s husband is having an affair are facts. They will not go away just because we refuse to pay attention to them. So the fact that company A is preparing to buy company B so that the price of their shares are going to rise is a fact of the world. In this sense there are facts about the world that are independent of our think so.

All of us recognize quickly enough that many of the facts of the world do not have this character.

• If enough people think a fact is true then the consequences of the belief bring the fact into existence.

• If we deny the existence of the fact, the consequences of the fact (which we take for granted or are likely not to think about too carefully or too closely) may not hold. So many religions can change the fact that if one is poor one is going to feel deprived by a construction; being poor now means that one is beloved of God.

If we look closely at some important aspects of fact the certainty and facticity of the world dissolves. There are a number of different kinds of facts. There are facts, there are relevant facts. There are significant facts there are central facts.

We can fill a thousand books with facts about each of us or anything in the world. Like the infinitude of sentences that we can utter facts are innumerable. Between any two there is another; given any two one can create a third representing the fact that both of the facts are true and then a next saying three are true together and so on. But most of these facts are irrelevant, absolutely useless except as facts. Some of them are significant given our purposes, given other facts we take as relevant about the world. What does this tell us about the factual character of the world?

The world consists of the relevant and potentially relevant facts about it. Data is significant only in a framework that establishes what are significant facts, what are relevant facts. We want to say that facts are given by contexts, by purposes, by the frameworks we use to generate (to notice and identify) the facts.

Two facts joined are not the same as two facts taken separately. You can change any fact (change the significance, meaning, of any fact.) Any fact can be changed when it is adjoined to another fact. Facts do not stay the same when they are put together with other facts. The fact that we cannot fly means one thing when it is put together with the fact that the airplane has been invented or that genetic engineering is possible. The fact that we cannot fly means quite another thing when it is put together with the fact that anti gravity devices are impossible (or possible.) We take facts as units. But they are not units. They are parts of units which like the digital clock make sense only when they are aspects of larger systems, when it is recognized that they cannot stand alone, never do stand alone. This means there are not individual facts in the world but only packages, parcels and clumps of facts. Facts then exist only collectively. No fact taken alone is a fact. Only in clumps or sets does an individual fact have a distinct existence meaning. Facts are real only as parts of a system of facts which itself is real only as a part of another system of facts.

We can see this only when the world is changing, only when the contexts that were the usual contexts of facts, the usual backgrounds of facts, are changing. Facts are the limit of what we of what we can see in the world and can’t change.

The smallest fact is really a pair of facts, like pages in a book which face one another. The hardest, most real of the facts always shows two faces and allows at least two interpretations. No fact exists in splendid isolation. An isolated fact is smoke reflected in a mirror.

The loss of a job is a multitude of facts. If you lose a job, you can interpret each of these ‘facts’ in many different ways. Each of these interpretations allows you to see yourself and the world in a slightly different way. The loss of a job appears one way when construed as an opportunity and another if seen as the loss of income. In the context of a rich, religious belief the death of a loved one is quite a different experience than that death seen in a hard cold materialist conception of the world.

This is the stuff of every self-help, change-your-life-book ever written. But given the changes in the world, today it is the hardest, coldest reality we confront in the world.

There is the world out there. Then there is our construction of that world. The hardest of facts is a construction under constraints. A fact is process in vivo.

Does this mean that we can believe anything we want, that no facts are real, that no information is definite? Definitely not! We are constrained because our facts have to work together like the parts of our digital clock. Facts and beliefs and perceptions have to fit together if we are going to act in the world.

In making sense out of reality we have to start in the middle, and have to have a picture of the end in order to produce the beginning. If you believe that we begin at the beginning and move in a line to the end—rather than beginning in the middle and finding the beginning through the end, today’s world is not going to make much sense to you.

When we take up the question of data and information paradox glares in our face and blinds us. As science churns faster and faster, the concepts —the words and terms — we use to describe the world changes rapidly. Facts are statements in words of the way we understand the world to be. But as the words we use to talk about the world change so does our perception of the world. What we see when we look at the world today is not what our ancestors saw when they looked at the world; it is not even what we saw when we looked at the world yesterday.

With change so rapid, the world does not stay still long enough for use to have confidence in the facts we accumulate. What was true when we identified something as a fact is often no longer true when we come back to use the fact to make our way in the world.

Facts seem to be based solidly and embedded in our sense. But we have machines for making photographs of things that never existed and for producing sounds that never were. We have techniques for modifying genes and creating creatures that never existed in nature. These machines and techniques change the character of what we can say we see and taste and feel and be. The drugs which affect our loving and our sexuality influence what we can assume and say about loving and sex. The roiling world of business and technology devours careers and occupations. A changing world changes what it means to be feminine, what it means to be generous, what courage means —what the facts of the world are.

The flood of information, the multiple sources, the dependence on machines to provide information means that facts have become intangible. Winning an important race now depends on a timing apparatus which we can only check up on only by using other pieces of apparatus that we can check up on only by using other pieces of apparatus that …. Similarly we depend on devices for sensing things we cannot sense without them and that we can check up on using other devices for sensing things that we can check up on using.... The chains have become so long that our senses are at the end of nearly infinite paths; and the paths are not linear. Faith and trust have become an integral part of facts in the modern world.

Even in our personal lives facts change as we learn more about ourselves, as we look back and forward. When life was short and stable, facts had the stillness to harden. What we believed were the facts are altered as we live longer and change careers and life styles in mid-life, understand more about who we have become.

Facts are an endangered species.

Data is information in its potential form, steam before it is frozen into ice or, depending on your perspective, ice on its way to becoming steam. When you look the facts square in the eye, you see the reflection and shadows of the information and knowledge which has already shaped it.

The upshot of all of this is that facts appear only after the fact, become data as they are used to manufacture information, made to produce knowledge.

Facts are what illusion aspires to be.

But it is true we have to start somewhere. Illusions penetrate reality to different depths. There are more primitive and less primitive illusions, more public and less public illusions, less processed and more processed illusions. There are more primitive and less primitive data, more public and less public data, less processed and more processed data. Illusion is too simple. There are mirages, tricks, error, mis-perceptions, misconceptions. Data can be all these things.

The fact is; we have to start somewhere but we never start at the beginning. Like the gears of a digital clock which are gears only when they make up the working clock, potential facts become facts only when they are used in the company of the other potential facts to do something. And they stay facts only when they are used as part of a collection of facts and beliefs and perceptions.

Chapter 18

The age of information

It is well known that we live in the age of information: We are constantly telling one another we do. We are told that the most significant innovation of our time, surpassing the invention of the printing press, is the computer, which is a device for making, collecting, storing and processing information. We are told the key to success is education, which is nothing more than advanced training in the processing of information. Is this true? Yes. But what is more true is:

We live, simultaneously, in several centuries.

We own a 1999 model of some car and this clearly marks us as late 20th century folk but the computer chips distributed through the vehicle identify us as early 21st century people. Yet the engine that drives it is a 19th century device. Our desires for a car, the reasons we buy one we share with fifth century peasants. And in our use of the car, our driving, we are closer to 1st century Mongols. So much for living in the 20th century.

We don’t think clearly about things

Most of it is not our fault. It is our biological imperative, the way nature made us. Our minds are constructed so that we can pick from a narrow set of choices very quickly. We can distinguish the lion from the lamb quickly enough to eat and avoid being eaten. We have a very profound sense of pattern, organization and order. But this capacity is hidden from us. It operates in the background, out of awareness, as if the ability to sniff out patterns, organize ourselves and maintain some order was an embarrassment. It is certainly an embarrassment of riches.

Some of it is our fault. It is the way we have adjusted our lives to be able to spend as much time as we can being entertained during that fragment of time that we live in the 21st century. At the same time we ask what is that entertainment? It is the electronic technology, a technology that has two contradictory effects: the electronic technology squeezes the world in the middle. It makes us passive receptors at the same time that it ratchets up our activity level.

Chapter 19

Kinds of information: Introduction

We are surrounded by information from the time that we are conceived until we die — and according to more than one religion, even after we die. It appears to be an extension of the amniotic fluid in which we are nurtured. In this Chapter we explore one of the qualities of information, its homogeneity. Is all information the same? Is it true that once you’ve seen one piece of information you have seen it all?

Yes and no, yes and no.

No: My love’s eyes, the taste of her lips, her voice whispering sweet nothings in my ear, all tell me different things different though they are aspects of a unitary love.

Yes: the digitalization of information has made information in the world like information in the brain, all homogeneous electrical charges. It has made differences in information a matter of connections, placement and processing. In the brain’s compass, all of the senses are transmuted into the same kind of signals, just as the digitalization of information makes all information, Beethoven’s Ninth and Picasso’s Guernica, a collection of indistinguishable bits of information on a disk. On the CD ROM on which my love appears speaking sweet nothings, her voice and her appearance are collections of identical pits on the suface of a disk.

Yes and no. As we are making the world operate like our brain, neither yes nor no is simple anymore. It makes sense to believe that there are many different species of information. Essentially, species means kinds. We use the more biologically pitched word because it connotes stronger differences. ‘Species’ projects some sense of organization, something that has aspects of a hierarchy of form and matter. Being in a hierarchy also gives a sense of direction to movement: it can evolve and devolve.

Species of information may compete for belief or credibility, dominance or relevance. Thus, some information has a higher status and is preferred if there is a choice.

We know more than we can say but can’t say how much more.

This is evident every day of our lives. We often find ourselves speechless and angry over the fact that we know that we know something but cannot find the words to express it. Sometimes it is only necessary to relax and momentarily ignore the difficulty. Temporarily abandoning the struggle to express oneself is often enough bring what we had in mind into focus. We also surprise ourselves frequently by coming up with new or unique (at least to us) information without ever consciously considering it. Most often this happens when speaking triggers connections between information components never before revealed to the self. Teachers, researchers, public speakers and comedians experience this frequently. They often surprise themselves with their sagacity or wit.

We are dumber than we think but smarter than we know.

We know more than we can ever say, more than we can effortfully recover from ourselves. We know things that there is no chance of our ever recovering from our heads; we know that we know these things. We just do not know what it is we know anymore. Words take us just so far in the world but never, never far enough. But how far away we are from where we want and need to be is never clear to us.

In dealing with information level and context are critical.

There is information and information about information and information about information about information. This is just not word play. The most important difference between the various species of information is their ‘level.’ When someone provides us information we need to know how valid the information is and we need to think about what information we are using to tell us how valid it is.

Information is a function of the context created around any facts and data. Understanding itself is nothing more than an achieved rung of complexity. Participation in context, composition of context is open.

In the past, in classical logic, context was bipolar. A particular element was either part of context or it is not. But modern fuzzy logic, fuzzy arithmetic, fuzzy set theory, leaves room for grayness, for partial belonging, for being here or there to some degree. As the context is graying, information itself becomes gray.

If information is at the heart of any relationship/connection then, if we come up with the right context, we can extract enormous amounts of information. Making ones way in the world is a matter of discovering the right context to extract just the amount of information needed from whatever you encounter. The level of information is a matter of context also. Here we speak of higher levels when data provides the context for other data. Notice that ‘level’ is a matter of slight of hand. There is nothing in the quality of the data that establishes its level. It is the way it functions as context that defines its level. Science is observation and context (theory.) By adding levels in the world we’ve changed our world.

Remember:

Information is not an object, it is not a distinct, identifiable thing although it often looks that way.

Information is not anywhere, it exists only in relationship with its surroundings, in a specific space and time; it is an arrangement, not an object. As such, it does not exist independently of its surroundings, nor of people using it.

The information which seems to be in the encyclopedia isn’t there anymore than the moving images on the screen are there as we see them. There is a pattern of light on the movie screen. When we watch a movie we are constantly making those patterns into information and constructing people from them. The apparatus of seeing, our eyes and brains make what appears on the screen into images in our heads. Think about the Guinness book of records or the Encyclopedia Britannica in some dead language for which we have no Rosetta Stone. What information is there, for whom? And what information is there after we find the Rosetta Stone?

And for exactly the same reason information is not ‘in’ anyone’s head, certainly not ‘in’ the head of the person who uses it to do things in the world. Whatever is in our heads becomes information only as we make sense out of a situation and use what is in our heads when we do something. Of course, one thing we can do is to set down what we know that we know on paper. But even here what is in our heads represents information only as we set it down and can then interpret what we have set and associate it with knowledge. A number of neurological abnormalities demonstrate that what appears to us normally as an essential connection is a contingent one.

Context should be thought of as an intellectual network in which specific pieces of information are nodes in the complex set of connections. Information cannot be transmitted without a common language or symbol system as part of the communication process. It can only be transmitted if the sender has enough of a grasp of the reality of a specific segment of the information species to form it into an acceptable projection.

As paradoxical as it seems, information —and data and knowledge—is nowhere in time and space.

What complicates matters more is that: There is no such thing as a single, unique communication; messages exist in a bundles or packages

What was true of language has become true of the world: meaningless sounds are the foundation of the deepest thought. To get a single message out of the bundle or package you must actively pull it apart. This can only be achieved by first putting the bundle or package in context and then extracting a message. Context takes on an additional role when we look at information for it acts as a filter that allows a single message to emerge. Multiple messages from a single bundle or package are possible with shifts in context. To get the right message you must have the correct context. That is both the problem and the solution. Since we are all unique individuals with our own world of “contexts” it is virtually impossible to think of a bundle or package that cannot deliver a message.

Information can only be communicated as data and understood as knowledge;

Data, information and knowledge are all facets of the same thing. They are bound constructs of the human mind connected to the world outside the mind and to actions of the agents whose minds they are part of. They shift their locus of activity easily from node to another.

Chapter 20

Obituaries

An abundance of new things must be accompanied by an abundance of deaths of old things. The earlier Chapters of the book dealt with births. This Chapter deals with the deaths.

Obituary 1: An information death.

The gender wars have a new victim. Male information is dying; female information is taking its place. A new common sense demands a different kind of information to make sense out of the world.

Male information is the ordinary kind of information we are used dealing with every day. It is information in the form of facts standing alone and facing the world. Male information is dying but not because it does not tell us about the world. It does. Male information is dying because it does not tell about the world in the way we need to know about it.

What we are calling female information has not fully developed yet. But the rough outline of the form it is taking is clear. It is dynamic information, information that does not appear to be fixed, information that is always reforming, adapting to the new environments in which it is used as information. Female information is information with its connections marked in bright colors. The new information—of which hypertext is a good example— will present itself to us with its connections hanging out. Its exposed connectivity will be its most endearing feature.

There are two reasons why the ordinary kind of information we use to navigate our common sense world— the kind of information we identify with maleness— is dying.

One reason is that as the glut of information increases, as machines manufacture and compile and distribute information, we move further and further away from the senses, our eyes and ears, as sources of information. We no longer see where the information we need to do what we have to do comes from. We no longer can use the usual sensory checks and balances we need to feel comfortable about our beliefs. Trust, intuition, and more intangible, higher order aspects of information become more basic in our understanding of the world. We increasingly depend on information about information and information about information about information to make sense of the world.

A second reason for the death of ‘male’ information is that the computer has digitalized information. The computer has reduced information to a common denominator; to electronic charges, to bits and bytes in the same way the brain reduces sounds and sights, and memories to electronic charges in cells. It has provided a basis for finding a common denominator in the diversity of arts and sciences. Commonality, belongingness, and inclusiveness mark information in our time.

Chapter 21

More deaths

Obituary2: The death of the machine as we know it.

Every project involves an input of information and an input of effort. You have to know something and you have to work to transform that knowledge into reality. Every plan requires effort to carry it out. Information and knowledge has never been enough— until now.

In the past machines were devices to amplify human effort. But even with machines, ever project required considerable human labor. In the past, humans had to babysit machines, supervise them, control them. Every machine required a human operator and humans to arrange the materials for the machines to work on. The accumulated labor embodied in machines was not enough. No matter how large, no matter how powerful the machines we had were, an enormous input of labor was required to carry out any action.

But this is no longer so. Our technology has developed to the point where the machines are now able to be controlled by other machines— by computers. This means that the actual human effort necessary to carry out any human action has been reduced.

The ratio of effort to knowledge in any action has decreased.

There is another way of seeing this. Machines have changed. What machines did in the past was amplify human effort. What machines do now is transform information into effort.

Where before machines multiplied human effort now they are transforming information into action, transforming human thinking and information into the effort of other machines. The nature of human action in the world has changed. One reason why the old common sense no longer makes sense of the world is that the nature of even the simplest machines has changed. The metaphor at the heart of the old common sense has changed drastically.

Chapter 22

Another death

Obituary 3: The death of a philosophy.

One consequence of the changes in the logic that governs the organization of things today is the death of Zen as a living philosophy. What is the connection of Zen to information? Why is Zen dead as a philosophy? Who or what killed it?

Beyond Zen.

Writers in the west have used Zen as the epitome of an odd rationality, a method of concentration and a purposefulness swaddled in contradiction. Zen pointed to viable, living paradox that crowns our lives. Zen was always used to reach beyond our normal rationalities.

Zen has also appeared as an attitude, a stance against normal life and against normal rationalities. Whereas the metaphors of clock and organism map out the center of our world, the continents and rivers, Zen exposes the boundaries, the edges of that world.

Zen represents a way of thinking about the world, a certain stance toward it. It epitomizes a reaching for a calm in the midst of the confusion of ordinary perceptions. Zen is a way of penetrating beyond the confusion of everyday life, a way of touching the simplicity that in the world that is always disguised, hidden by the normal noise in everyday life.

Zen has been held up as an ultimate way of non-thinking about the world; the ultimate anti-tactic. Zen stands for purpose through anti-purpose, concentration by dis-attention; For many of us in the West, Zen was a hidden escape route, a last resort. When things got hairy we knew there was still a way out.

One side effect of the contemporary changes in common sense and information is that Zen as a philosophy, as a fall back position for making sense of the world is dead. We have gone beyond Zen.

Our everyday lives, bobbing in a sea of information, have carried us beyond Zen. Our normal life forces on us the attitude that Zen forced induced earlier generations. Our daily realities impose an absolutely Zen like, non-linear mode of non-thinking. Information has brought us beyond Zen.

The changes in information have killed Zen by bringing it into ordinary life; Without meditation, without priests, without clapping hands, Zen has been absorbed into our everyday perspectives: it is dead as a separate philosophy.

Chapter 23

Levels

Every species of information is integrated into a full set of hierarchies, an integrated set of levels, a comprehensive set of contexts. We are always playing with a full deck; it is impossible to play with less than a full deck.

Two things make trouble. First there are always more than one hierarchy involved. Second, the deck we are playing with may be virtual. Like much of what we are saying this summary may appear ambiguous and obscure. But there is a very practical point it is making.

Whenever we see any fact, recognize any datum we are always using a complete frame of reference to locate it. To identify anything we need to provide a context for it, an framework in which it is set. We identify it using a certain vocabulary. We see it in the course of certain actions which have some context of purpose around it. This material is the full deck we are talking about. But this full deck is usually invisible. We use it without thinking about it. And the full deck is extensive. It has to handle all of the world that we are not dealing with at any time. Usually it is the default deck we work with. That is the only piece of the deck we are worrying about is the few cards in front and in back of where we are now.

The problem:

•We said that context is everything; context and hierarchy makes a piece of information determinate;

•We said that there are multiple contexts available for every piece of data.

•We said that the parts of a system change when they become part of a system.

•We said that when they are taken out of the system they are not what they are when they are in the system. Outside the system they have a virtual existence.

•We said that everything has become connected to everything else. That we are connected to more and more elements of the world. That we ourselves are members of more and more systems.

•We remind you that we are the parts of these systems.

Of course, the deck can be stacked against us; and, of course, the deck we are playing with may be the wrong deck. We can have trouble recognizing the relevant hierarchy or its subdivisions and we always have problems with context into which the hierarchy fits.

We call a deck stacked against us ignorance, lack of education, stupidity or want of good communication skills.

Some levels may be only sketched in or outlined. Others may be taken for granted, assumed, unconscious, out of awareness. Nonetheless, we are always playing with a full deck, with all of the needed equipment. The difficulty is making sure we are working with the right complete deck for our purposes.

A secret is information on its way up in the world; gossip is information on its way down.

Context is all. But an additional element is added which is value and validity. Value rears its ugly head once again for information decreases in value as more and more people receive the message. The value of information can increase if the context changes and boosts the relevancy information to the group. Information without a good context is gossip.

Today’s gossip is tomorrow’s secret.

Chapter 24

Chickens

As soon as you tell children what a thing IS, they bombard you with questions. If you tell a child what a chicken is, or point one out to them and name it, he/she immediately bombards you with chicken questions.

The more information you receive the more you need. The reflexive response to the receipt of information is a demand for more information. This is a need, a compulsion, not a desire or whim. Adults do not recognize the compulsion because it has been worked out of them on the road to adulthood. In modern society information is highly addictive. It is so addictive that a warning should be placed on it.

Warning! Information may be hazardous to your health.

One of the things a child immediately tries to find out when they are told for the first time that something is a chicken or what a chicken is, “Are there different kinds of chickens?”

Children rarely ask the question directly. They ask,”Is a horse a chicken?” then in rapid fire “Is a mosquito a chicken?” and then why, then, “How is a mosquito different from a chicken?” They will continue to ask for differences until the adult they are dealing with says, “Stop. Wait a minute!” which immediately tells the child that they have gone over a line. What line is it? The child has learned what the outer limits are, the far boundaries of the idea of chicken. Then they loose interest in chickens entirely and bother you about something else. The reason their interest falls off is that they have acquired the information they need to make sense out of ‘chicken.’

The point of this is that you need information to make sense out of information. You can only make sense out of information if you have and use other information.

You need both information and an information context to make sense out of information.

We will try to explain this behavior later, but here is a preview. To make sense out of anything children need a context and a context for the context. The identities the child proposes and the “Why” is a child’s request to you to define a context and contexts of contexts . The similarities to things they name as possible identities of an object, —mosquitos and horses in our example—identifies an immediate context for them. Once they have this, they have pinned ‘chicken’ down finely enough to go about their business.

When we are learning something new we are all children again, We expect you want to know what kinds of information there are. If you are really following carefully, you might be asking yourself how something that cannot ‘be’ in the usual sense, can have kinds. It is a good question. We admire your curiosity.

Chapter 25

Kinds of information continued

Instead of talking about kinds of information we want to talk about species of information. It is a maneuver, a tactic, a stylistic turn. Species are just a name for a kind but as you know from your reading so far we have qualified this a bit. One may ask: What different kinds of information are there?

Information differs by content, by what it is about. Some information is about lightning, other information is about lightning bugs. There is information about chickens, information about frogs, information about time and space. Of course there is information about information.

Information differs by level; there is information and information about information. Information about information (meta-information) appears as ideas or concepts or propositions. But almost every message is taken as containing information about itself; information is always reflexively used to establish its own level.

Information differs in terms of its source. The form of the original data that stimulates a message often dictates the level of inquiry and context in which the information is dealt with. Some information about a dead chicken may have come from killing it or seeing a chicken die. Other information may have come indirectly, from hearing from a friend that it died or from seeing Frank Purdue holding up a processed, cooked and packaged chicken on TV and making an inference. Thus, there is direct information gathered from first hand experience, and information at any level of indirection and distance from its source.

Information differs in terms of its form. Information may come as sense data, as a written message, a picture, a set of punches on cards or electrical or magnetic values on a chip. But it is critical to remember that once in the brain all information is in the same form. Digitalization mimics the way the brain handles information. No matter what the original form of information was, in the brain becomes a pattern of neural impulses; in a computer it is a series of charges on chips.

In the brain information is homogeneous and indistinguishable; in the brain information takes only one form. But outside of the brain information takes many forms. Each different form identifies a species or subspecies of information.

Information differs in value. Some information is invaluable, other information less valuable and other information is worthless. Why is this. The value of information is what it lets you do; action is primary.

Timeliness and scarcity affect the value of information While the basic structure of a piece of information is not affected by time, timeliness is what makes some information more valuable than other information. Scarcity is another aspect of information value. Sometimes, the more scarce the information, the fewer people who know about it, the more valuable information often becomes. But this is not always true; often, the more people know about it the more valuable a piece of information is. Scarcity in a positive or negative form is related to the value of information.

Information differs in the use to which it is put. There is information that is practically useful and other information that is practically inapplicable. And the information may be used for good or for ill. While we may attempt to put a value on information based on practicality we must remember the context yet again. For information that is impractical today may not be so tomorrow or in another context. Thus, the difference is based more on the time and place of use than on the inherent value of the information.

Information differs in the way it corresponds to reality. We consider some information to be true and other information to be false although it may have been true in the past, or may become true in the future. But true and false are only one kind of correspondence. True and false represent an association of information and source of information. What this means is that we accept some information —when it is contextualized by other information —to correspond to what we take as the source of information. But there are different ways of corresponding and these are also matters of information.

There are facts about the world; there is gossip, there is rumor and mis-information.

Chapter 26

Differences

Does all of this make a difference? If so, what difference does it make? Information calls our attention to a feature of the world that we have been able to overlook until now. Until now (with science leading the way) we have always solved big problems by breaking them into a collection of smaller component problems and solving each of the smaller problems in turn, individually as if it existed separately from the big problem of which it was a part. A solution to the big problem then consisted of splicing together the solutions to all of the little problems that we had solved separately. We solved the problems of the parts and get the whole for nothing.

With information we cannot pull off this slight of hand. We must come to terms with wholes as utilitarian objects. We cannot longer defer the issue of wholes until the problem of the part is dealt with. We cannot separate out a part from a whole and deal with it ignoring the whole from which it was taken. There are no longer simple parts; there are only part-wholes, The simplest unit we can deal with is a part with the whole of which it a part associated with it in some way.

We can no longer treat parts and wholes as practically separable entities. We cannot longer postpone facing wholes until we have explored and understood each part. It is now incumbent upon the culture to come up with a methodology and conceptual apparatus in which both the whole and the parts can only be dealt with in parallel. This means we must invent a framework in which, even though we focus and attend to the part, we must simultaneously conceptually manipulate the whole.

Information is an irreducible system, a constellation that cannot be broken down into parts and still retain meaning. This flies again common sense but only as much as the idea that there are as many points in the interval from zero to one as there are from zero to three flies in the face of common sense. What we really need is an outside (not of this world) consultant!

Chapter 27

Obvious things

Some obvious things escape notice, really escape it. They are so obvious they are virtually invisible to most of us; here is one.

Any communication carries an infinite set of messages

When we get a message from any communication, or from any event carrying information which is the same thing, we are not getting the message. What we are getting is one of an infinite series of messages carried by the communication. We receive our message correctly only when all of the other messages become invisible, have been filtered by context, which drops them out as so much noise. But our message is only one part of the spectrum represented in the information communicated.

We may receive information that Aunt Clara has just survived a 7.5 earthquake at her home in Santa Crista California. We are, obviously, pleased to hear from our dear Aunt. The message was clear, unambiguous and in context. Hooray! To a geologist there is much more information than we received. Given his/her context the geographical location and the intensity of the earthquake provides critical information on the event. To the telecommunications company that served as a carrier of the message there is quite different information; the earthquake resistant equipment and telephone lines operated to expectations at a critical moment. We hope that you get the message.