[Sigia-l] RE: Data vs. Information

[Christopher Fahey [askrom]]

Philip Hall wrote:
> oral societies didn't really have information because 
> everything, including stories, teachings, and oral histories,  
> were experienced in a kind of real-time event.

I disagree with this rationale. The act of reading the printed word,
listening to the radio, or watching television (three example modes of
media-based communication that an oral society does not posess) is still
a "real-time event". I for one have many bits of information in my mind
that have a ghostly co-memory of where I was when I read the book
containing that information, indeed even what part of the page of the
book the information was printed on. Whether I heard the story on my
grandpa's knee or from CNN doesn't make one communication information
and the other not.

That said, I think that the substantive difference between oral
communication and media communication is not in the mode of *information
delivery*, but rather in the mode of *information storage*. And to that
extent, one might argue information is not really information unless it
is reliably stored.

So to come full circle, perhaps the original argument ("Information is
what we extract from the flow of experience") should be better
understood as "Information is what we extract _and record_ from the flow
of experience".

Cheers,

-Cf

[christopher eli fahey]
art: http://www.graphpaper.com
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