[Sigia-l] Findability is dead, Long live ummm... Meaning?

[Faith Peterson (E-mail)]

Maybe people think twice before treading onto the "understanding" ground
because it is fraught with issues one doesn't confront in findability. If
structure imparts or creates meaning, then whoever creates the structure
decides what information "means". And everyone out there purveying
information today is not too concerned with providing information so we can
build our own structures and create our own meaning. Instead the media are
full of airing of various marketing pitches, spins, opinions, half-truths,
Big Lies - and if you can dig your way to any actual "facts" it turns out
the meaning you can build depends on whose "facts" you've been able to find.

Much, if not in fact all, of IA work is taking place in the business and
government arena. It's one thing to be an impartial creator of ways to
enable people to find information. It's a whole other thing to participate
in an effort to structure that information to create meaning for them on
behalf of organizations who are paying us, but whose objectives at this
level we may or may not support. What an terrible responsibility. It's the
point where we can no longer imagine that our work is value-neutral.

With that said, I'm hugely interested in ways to enable people to get at
real information, and to help end users of information evaluate and organize
information. There is a very interesting discussion in a relatively old
book, Hyper/text Theory edited by George Landow, about how meaning is
created in the interaction between the reader and the text, and the reader's
traversal of links creates a brand new and unique work every time the
hypertext author's work product is encountered. Compare this with the almost
obsessive need some parts of our society have to control, or try to control,
what people think, know, and believe. Where does the IA community fit, and
what are our ethical responsibilities as a profession?

This seems like an interesting thread and I hope I haven't taken it off
course. I've been lurking for a while, but this topic really piqued my
interest.

Faith Peterson
faithp at wideopenwest.com