When ‘The Difference That Makes a Difference’ Makes a Difference: A Bottom-Up Approach to the Study of Information

 Magnus Ramage and I had this paper published in the MDPI journal Information earlier this year.

Chapman, David, and Magnus Ramage. 2021. "When ‘The Difference That Makes a Difference’ Makes a Difference: A Bottom-Up Approach to the Study of Information" Information 12, no. 2: 77. https://doi.org/10.3390/info12020077

We thought of it as something in the nature 'rounding off' the DTMD project, as our DTMD group at the Open University has morphed into the Critical Information Studies group, now chaired by Dr Mustafa Ali.

Here's the paper abstract:

The concept of information is foundational to many disciplines yet also problematic and contested. This article contributes to the understanding of information through discussion of the findings of the interdisciplinary Difference That Makes a Difference (DTMD) project. DTMD used international conferences and workshops to bring together individuals from a wide range of disciplines to share how their field understands information, to engage in interdisciplinary conversations, and to contribute to edited publications. A simple answer to the question ‘what is information?’ is not forthcoming, but, it is argued, should no more be expected than would be an answer to ‘what is matter?’. Nevertheless, through exploration of the areas of consensus that emerged from the bottom-up process of interdisciplinary dialogue, this paper offers ten assertions about the nature of information narratives for further debate. The assertions range from ‘information requires a body’, through ‘information always has meaning’ and ‘information cannot be stored or communicated’ to ‘information is always shaped by power, authority and hierarchy’. This article finishes by illustrating and testing the assertions against an information case study of a team of medical experts disseminating information to the general public about the COVID-19 virus. 

The most controversial assertion in this paper, arguably, is that information cannot be stored or communicated. Before you dismiss that, dear reader, please read the paper!

I'm now retired so I'm not sure whether and how much I will continue my interest in developing an understanding of the nature of information, though I don't suppose I'll ever stop thinking about it. As it said on an OU colleague's coffee mug: old professors never die, they just lose their faculties.

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.

The artist's hand

When I was at the Turing 12 art exhibition Intuition and Ingenuity at Birmingham University, I overheard Anna Dumitriu explaining to another visitor about the movement to remove the artist's hand from art. I found myself wondering how much of the artist they were wanting to eliminate. How far away are you pushing the artist? In terms of the layers and trapeziums, I can think of it being about removing the artist from the lower layers, but how far up do you go? The artist presumably must still be there at the top? There must be some idea; some emotion; some something to communicate?

But then I was once told that some artists would baulk at talking about art as communication. I remain to be convinced about that. I can't see how it could be about anything other than communication in the most general sense.  It is true, however, that I've no expertise in art, so when I say 'I remain to be convinced', I'm not meaning 'I'm not going to let you convince me'. If someone could explain art to me in way that doesn't involve communication, I would learn a lot from it. (It would be lots of information for me, because low probability = high information, in the Shannon sense.)

Well anyway, I could do with finding out more about this movement and the 'hand of the artist', so to start with here's a couple of things from a google search.

Making sense of Marcel Duchamp:

If you want to break all the rules of the artistic tradition, Duchamp reasoned, why not begin by discarding its most fundamental values: beauty and artisanship. The readymades were Duchamp’s answer to the question, How can one make works of art that are not “of art”?

It was an audacious proposal, and to execute it Duchamp employed an equally audacious method: he withdrew the hand of the artist from the process of making art, substituting manufactured articles (some custom-made, some ready-made) for articles made by the artist, and substituting random or nonrational procedures for conscious design.

The results are works of art without any pretense of artifice, and unconcerned with imitating reality in any way. [...]

Duchamp’s most notorious readymade was a manufactured urinal entitled Fountain. Conceived for a show promoting avant-garde art, Fountain took advantage of the show’s lack of juried panels, which invariably excluded forward-looking artists.

Under a pseudonym, “R. Mutt,” Duchamp submitted Fountain. It was a prank, meant to taunt his avant-garde peers. [...]

As surely as it was a prank, Fountain was also, like the other readymades, a calculated attack on the most basic conventions of art. Duchamp defended the piece in an unsigned article in The Blind Man, a one-shot magazine published by his friend Beatrice Wood. To the charge that Fountain was mere plagiarism, “a plain piece of plumbing,” he replied “Whether Mr. Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view — created a new thought for that object.”

The Art Damien Hirst Stole:

In 1995, Damien Hirst defended his work with the rationale, "It's very easy to say, 'I could have done that,' after someone's done it. But I did it. You didn't. It didn't exist until I did it."

In 2000, he decided that doing it was not the justification after all: "I don't think the hand of the artist is important on any level, because you're trying to communicate an idea."

In 2006, the idea of the artist was not important on any level either: "Lucky for me, when I went to art school we were a generation where we didn't have any shame about stealing other people's ideas. You call it a tribute".

It's good to come to Damien Hirst, here, and especially since the spot paintings come in to the discussion (as you see if you follow the link above - remember that Hirst gets other people to do the painting) since I played around with the spot paintings a while back.

Notice that Hirst does (did) say "you're trying to communicate an idea", but that was in 2000  Then we're told that in 2006 "the idea of the artist was not important on any level either".

Is this the onion again? You keep peeling to get to the pure essence of art until there's nothing left? That's what it's starting to look like to me.

There's no information without communication...

... and no communication without information?

Some - many - years back we were discussing suggestions for a new name for the department where I work at the OU.  We discussed ICT: The Department of Information and Communication Technologies, and my colleague, Professor John Monk, commented that there was tautology in "information and communication" because Information and Communication are the same thing*.

Try to think of information without communication. It's like the tree falling in a forest that nobody hears. There may be information that's not communicated, but without it being communicated it may as well not exist. And unlike with the sound waves and the tree - the sound waves may leave some evidence that we can find later - there's no get-out with information. We only know about the information through communication, we can only know about information through communication. (The communication might, however, be through time rather than space - it can be memory.)

Similarly, what can be communicated if not information? Well actually, maybe there is answer to that,  Perhaps, for example, emotion can be communicated.  See John Monk's chapter in Ramage and Chapman, and the discussion of the different functions of signs: expressive (emotive); conative; phatic; meta-lingual; poetic. However, these only come through the interpretation of the signs, and to communicate the sign itself requires information?

In the trapezium model, it's information at the bottom and these other things out the top.

This seems to be taking me towards the fact that there are things other than information that can be communicated, so 'information and communication' is not quite a tautology, but for each you need the other.

Perhaps this intimate link between information and communication is one of the insights from Shannon.


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* Warning! The details of this story may be wrong, my memory is not reliable. The key fact, though, is that the musing in this post were inspired by a comment of John's. If there is anything clever here it is probably due to John. If there isn't anything clever, it is probably because I misunderstood what John was saying.

UNCTAD Information Economy Report 2009: page 3

See also Page 1 and Page 2 of my notes

At the launch of the Information Economy Report 2009 in Manchester last week, following Torbjörn Fredriksson's presentation, Richard Heeks gave a commentary.

Richard started by observing that in the recent past the 'ICT4D agenda' has been tied to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) but suggested that in the future the focus would instead be on resilience, because of the 'shocks' of:

- climate change
- the economic problem
- terrorism

Richard suggested that all of these would affect the developing countries most. I'm not sure this quite squared with what Torbjörn had said about the financial crisis. I thought - though I may have misunderstood - that Torbjörn had suggested that the small businesses in developing countries were not able to get credit, so had not been damaged so much by the recent financial crises, which as essentially a failure of credit. (Mind you, it seems a pretty consistent fact of life that whenever anything goes wrong, it is the poorest and least powerful that suffer the most.) Torbjörn indicated that resilience would a theme of next year's UNCTAD IER report.

Richard also mentioned 'development 2.0' as new models for development. An example he gave was of peer-peer micro-lending, in which individuals in the 'North' lend to individuals in the 'South', enabled by the internet. Despite my personal scepticism whenever anyone labels anything '2.0'... I can see that something like that fits with the ideas of 'web 2.0'. In the context of resilience, he described a picture of the web 'holding' poor countries, supporting them in uncertain times. I think that was what he was saying, but it sounded dangerously patronising to me (which is not how I think of things that emerge from the Centre for Development Informatics (CDI) in Manchester, so maybe I was not hearing it right).

The final note I have made of what Richard had to say was that he mentioned another report due shortly, the ICT4D report from the World Bank - he suggested this, light-heartedly, was a 'competing' report to the UNCTAD IER report.

Following Richards Heeks, Brian Nicholson led the general discussion.

Someone - maybe Brian himself - commented on the absence of a trickle-down effect from high-tech industries. For example, the Indian software industry only helps the well-off.

There was a discussion of the extent to which the private sector, rather than state, funds development. For example, bandwidth is being brought to Africa by the privately-funded optical fibre cables along the coast. There was a question as to whether the finance model for mobile broadband would work: do the potential customers have enough money? Richard pointed out that it was the private sector that funded mobile telephony - it might not have been thought that would be possible, so could it do the same for broadband? Is it significantly different?

More snippets from the discussion:

- what about the environmental impact of ICTs in developing countries. Torbjörn pointed to www.ungis.org
- in the light of the financial crisis, a survey asked what you would give up. In both developed and developing countries, the mobile phone was the last to go. If you want a family to give up smoking, give them a mobile phone! (They'd rather have the money to spend in the phone than cigarettes)
- need both infrastructure and skills.
- contrast India (industry came from high skills) and China (came from the base)
- capacity building problem. Eg there are a few hundred network administrators in Africa. Thousands are needed
- Grameen, the women in Bangladesh providing a mobile phone service, are now having problems because of competition

UNCTAD Information Economy Report 2009: page 2

See also Page 1 and Page 3 of my notes

UNCTAD's Information Economy Report shows that while the gap between the developed and developing countries in terms of access to a phone is decreasing, the gap in terms of access to broadband is increasing.

In his presentation, Torbjörn Fredriksson showed this increasing gap with Figure 1.8 of the report:

Global and fixed broadband subscribers by main country groupings, per 100 inhabitants.

This is simply explained. The rise in broadband access in developed countries has so far been mostly ADSL (asymmetric digital subscriber line) over the telephone (or CATV) wires. Developing countries have never been wired up in the same way, so don't have the infrastructure to carry the broadband. They are catching up in terms of telephony precisely because mobile phones don't need the wires. The interesting question now is whether wireless broadband will, in time, allow them to catch up in terms of broadband as well.

The evolution of wireless broadband is still unclear. In developed countries wireless broadband is largely delivered by a combination of Wi-Fi for fixed wireless over short distances (Wi-Fi 'hotspots') and 3G mobile broadband. An alternative - and more recent development - is WiMAX, which is like Wi-Fi for longer links. WiMAX is not used much in developed countries at the moment (well not in the UK anyway), but I understand it might be installed more in developing countries.

Some more snippets from my notes of the presentation and discussion:

- Most internet users are now in developing countries. A total of 1.4 billion users worldwide, 300 million of them in China
- The 'financial climate' has led to a decline in the exports of ICT goods (as opposed to services), but China - and only China - has now recovered back to the level before the decline
- Exports of IT and ICT-enabled services did not decline. 'Off-shoring' continued during the downturn.
- Gaps that remain: urban/rural; large firms/small firms; by industries; by language
- Importance of agriculture in developing countries. Note that reports often do not even consider agriculture because it is not so significant in developed countries

Following Torbjörn presentation, Richard Heeks gave a commentary.

I like to keep my blog posts short, so I'll say something about that on another page.

UNCTAD Information Economy Report 2009

See also Page 2 and Page 3 of my notes

The UNCTAD (United Nations Conference on Trade and Development) Information Economy Report 2009 was launched last Thursday, 22nd October.

I was able to attend an event organised by the Centre for Development Informatics (CDI) in Manchester on Friday, at which Torbjörn Fredriksson of UNCTAD introduced the report, Richard Heeks of CDI presented a commentary and Brian Nicholson (also of CDI) chaired the meeting and discussion.

Here's some highlights that caught my attention.

The report divides the world up into three groups: Developed countries, Developing countries and 'Economies in Transition' (EIT). The first two are familiar, the third, EIT, consists mainly of former 'Eastern Block' countries in Europe - Croatia, Belarus, Azerbaijan etc.

The way in which that third group are 'in transition' is wonderfully displayed by the Figure 1.2 of the report (I've extracted this figure from Torbjörn's presentation - I hope no-one objects, but since it is available in the freely-downloadable report, I'm assuming they won't):

Global mobile telephone subscriptions by the main economy groupings, 2003-2008.

You can see from this that even in developing countries mobile subscriptions are rising rapidly, but that probably isn't news to anyone. There's been lots said about the uptake of mobile telephones in developing countries (including in some OU courses such as T324: Keeping Ahead in ICT) but this report - of course - explores it in depth.

The report is chock-full of statistics to get your head around - and to make up stories about. In the list of 'Twenty most dynamic economies in terms of increased mobile penetration, 2003-2008' (figure 1.4 of the report), no. 1 is Montenegro which now has 2.35 sim cards per person, which compares with 1.22 sim cards per person in the UK. There was some discussion at the presentation about why that (no. sim cards/person) is the measure used and what it means. Torbjörn explained that the reason it is used is simply that that is the measure available (I guess you know how many sim cards are sold and what the population is). Fair enough! Concerning its significance, one point made by a member of the audience was that network coverage and reliability may drive the need to have more than one card. You might need more than one sim card to increase your chance of getting access whenever and wherever you are. Maybe that is more of a problem in Montenegro than in the UK. (Torbjörn asked for a show of hands in the room, for who had more than one sim card. I'd say something like 60-70% of us put our hands up.)

Torbjörn talked about the way in which applications of mobile phones are being developed locally - in the developing countries themselves. This ties in with what Hannah Beardon discussed in the interviews that she recorded for the OU earlier this year.

Overall, the gap between the developed and developing countries in terms of access to a phone is decreasing, but in contrast the gap in terms of access to broadband is increasing. I'll say more about that another day.

Comparing Geography is History and The Death of Distance

In material I'm writing for TU100: My Digital Life (a new OU course due out in 2011), I called a section Geography is History.

One of the other members of the team writing the course suggested that The Death of Distance is a more familiar phrase. But, while at one level they are both slogans drawing attention to the ease of communication brought about by recent technologies, on another level they have rather different resonances.

Geography is History is a phrase that was used by BT for marketing some of their broadband internet business products. My attention was first drawn to it by Professor Doreen Massey in an internal OU talk a few years back. I recall Professor Massey saying* that the phrase might taken to be referring to the idea that the subject of (human) geography is 'nothing but' a branch of history. That is the idea that there are no fundamental differences between peoples, rather that populations in different places are at different stages along the same historical timeline. Thus the UK is 10 years behind the USA and so on. To me this and related themes are important ideas that lead all sort of places. Eg, it could be that globalisation is killing geography, so that maybe there used to be geographical differences, but now globalisation - and the internet - are turning the world into a single timeline.

* If anything I say is wrong, that's me remembering it wrong or misunderstanding, not Prof Massey getting it wrong, of course!

The Death of Distance I don't like, to start with simply because of the dark, cold, connotations of death picked up by the alliteration with distance. There's something science fiction dark-side about it (Darth Vadar). Maybe that's not really legitimate, so lets explore further. The positive angle it is picking up, of course, is of ending distance between people, distance which could be interpreted in lots of different ways such as emotional distance as well as physical distance. So in this sense the death of distance is all good. The only negativity comes from the word death, and so the only negativity is the negativity you might have in, say, killing smallpox. (Or waging a war on terror...?)

So, I think what I'm suggesting is that Geography is History leads to more places than the Death of Distance. Geography is History is more ambiguous, and ambivalent about the benefits of improved communication technology. In spite of the darker words, Death of Distance only points to the good that comes about from improving communication - the ending of distance between people - whereas Geography is History reminds us that that we could be losing something of value. Assuming of course that you do value differences between people, which I do. And then, more directions, the debate about multiculturalism springs to mind!

Undervaluing Shannon

I've finally reached the point in Chandler where he mentions Shannon. I knew it was coming because I'd looked it up in the index, but I've been very strong-willed, and worked my way linearly¹ through the book², resisting the temptation to jump ahead.

Chandler makes very little of Shannon and passes on quite quickly. I think he's not giving due credit to the degree to which Shannon's ideas have fed into much else of what he has been discussing. Or more generally I think ideas from communication engineering have been used and developed in other fields. The idea of a 'code' in semiotics, did that not come from the codes of telecommunications?

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1 Doing things 'linearly' is almost a term of abuse these days. I'm always hopping around and being very non-linear, but I still think of that as getting distracted. The more linear I'm being, the more focussed I am.

2 'The book', actually I changed from the 1st edition to the 2nd edition somewhere around page 100!