[Sighfis-l] The New Atlantis special issue on "Information, Matter, and Life"

[Michael Buckland]

The latest issue of /The New Atlantis: A Journal of Technology and 
Society /(No 51, Winter 2017) is a special issue on "Information" and 
composed of seven essays critiquing excesses on theorizing information. 
An Editor's note explains:

> A motif running through these essays is that, especially in 
> contemporary science, information has become something of an ideology. 
> At its extreme, this ideology holds that, as James Gleick puts it in 
> his book /The Information/ 
> <https://www.amazon.com/Information-History-Theory-Flood/dp/1400096235/ref=as_sl_pc_qf_sp_asin_til?tag=thenewatl-20&linkCode=w00&linkId=663bb8c7f207abc98e26b606e9a8689e&creativeASIN=1400096235>, 
> the whole universe is “a computer — a cosmic information-processing 
> machine.” There are more modest versions of the ideology, as when 
> computer metaphors are used to describe human beings, saying, for 
> example, that our brains are “wired” a certain way or that we are 
> “programmed” by our genes. Whether extreme or modest, however, the 
> ideology of information has implications for our understanding of the 
> universe. These big questions about fundamental reality are 
> inextricably bound up with our self-understanding, including our 
> beliefs about free will and the nature of consciousness. And these 
> beliefs are in turn bound up with much more practical questions of how 
> we can live well together.
>
> Information and “info-talk” are so pervasive that they increasingly 
> are taken for granted. In offering this special issue, we hope to hint 
> at an alternative to the ideology of information — an alternative 
> understanding of information and information theory that is grateful 
> for many of the powerful tools they make possible, but that is aware 
> of their limitations and wary of their intrusions into inappropriate 
> domains.
>
   This issue is available for only $7 + $3 pp and also openly 
accessible online at
http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/number-51-winter-2017

Michael Buckland

-- 
Michael Buckland
Emeritus Professor, School of Information,
University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720-4600
http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~buckland/

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