Thursday 8 December 2016

Information cannot be stored or communicated

Or rather, it is not information but data that is stored and communicated*.

Data are differences that have been given meaning (remember that data needs information).

Information is the trapezium at the end of the communication in which the meaning is extracted from the data. Or, better, the trapezium uses the data to create an information entity in a narrative.

So, what is on the SD on my phone is data, but data which someone/something somewhere imbued with meaning and which I intent to use as information. So I may reasonably talk about it as though it were information, but it is not actually information.

In working towards a unified narrative/theory of information, this distinction is important. You only get information where it is interpreted. Information is relative, in the sense that you only have information for something/someone - for a narrative. 

*Storage, BTW, is communication in time rather than space. Communication takes time, so communication in space is also communication in time. Unless we stay exactly at the same place, which is probably impossible, storage also involves communication in space. So there's only one sort of communication which is communication in space-time.

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