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Understanding Information in the Context of Media Ecology

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Understanding Information in the Context of Media Ecology Information 2012, 3, 442-471; doi:10.3390/info3030442 OPEN ACCESS information ISSN 2078-2489 www.mdpi.com/journal/information Article Counting Electric Sheep: Understanding Information in the Context of Media Ecology Lance Strate Department of Communication and Media Studies, Fordham University, 441 E. Fordham Road, Bronx, NY 10458, USA; E-Mail: [email protected]; Tel.: +1-718-817-4864; Fax: +1-718-817-4868 Received: 29 August 2012; in revised form: 5 September 2012 / Accepted: 7 September 2012 / Published: 18 September 2012 Abstract: In the field of media ecology, defined as the study of media as environments, media and medium, and ecology and environment are key terms, while information, although commonly employed, is generally used without reference to a specific definition. This article examines the mostly implicit assumptions about and understandings of the term information in the context of the field of media ecology. Information can be seen as a synonym or subset of content or message, can be divided into different orders or levels of content/communication and relationship/medium, and on both levels is dependent on and altered by changes in technology, code, and form. Although sometimes discussed as if it were a substance, information is best understood as a function of communication, which in turn is a function of mediation. As a function of mediated communication, information is closely associated with news and control. Information is also considered the defining characteristic of our contemporary period, but is best understood as a product of electricity, electric technology, and the electronic media. As we have moved from orality to literacy to electricity, so too has the emphasis shifted from wisdom to knowledge to information. Despite popular celebration, this evolution is not an unmitigated good, and what is needed is a balanced media environment. Keywords: media; medium; information; form; code; relationship; electricity; technology; media ecology Information 2012, 3 443 1. Introduction: The Meaning of Information in the Field of Media Ecology Media ecology is a field that has been defined as the study of media as environments [1], and it should come as no surprise that the key terms in this field are media and medium, and to a lesser extent, ecology and environment. Information is a term that is commonly used within the field, occasionally drawing on the precise, scientific definition put forth by Claude Shannon more than half a century ago, based on probability theory, grounded in the Second Law of Thermodynamics and the property of entropy, and tied to the phenomenon of uncertainty [2]. For the most part, however, information is employed without reference to this or any other specific definition, relying on popular assumptions of what the term represents. The aim of this article is to examine our understanding of the term information, and the phenomena it refers to, in the context of the field of media ecology. To this end, I will discuss the meaning of the term as it is used within the field in this introductory section, then how the concept of information is used in the analysis of media environment in the second section, followed by a discussion of how information is understood as a function in the third section. In the final section of this article, I will emphasize the idea that our current “information age” is a product of electronic media, concluding with some thoughts on how the concepts of wisdom, knowledge, and information respectively can be connected to orality, literacy, and electricity. 1.1. The Medium Is the Message Central to the field of media ecology is McLuhan’s famous aphorism, “the medium is the message” [3], and while the saying has a number of different meanings [4], and may seem in some ways to conflate medium and message, its foundation is the distinction between media and the messages they carry, also framed as a distinction between medium and content. The term information is sometimes used in ways that are somewhat synonymous with content or message, as that which is contained, preserved, and/or shared by a medium. It follows that, like content or a message, information can be transferred from one medium to another, but cannot exist independently of any medium, in some abstract realm of its own. Media ecology is grounded, in part, in the materialism of modern science, and it follows that information cannot exist outside of the parameters of the physical universe. Information is produced by energy (which can also take the form of matter), Shannon defined it as the opposite of entropy [2], but the key point is that information as content or message must have some kind of material form. It cannot be present in a vacuum as it were, devoid of situational context or physical environment. Within the study of media as environments, information can only be communicated by a medium, can only be produced through the agency of a medium, can only emerge out of a medium as system, can only exist within a medium as environment [4]. 1.2. Form and Information The term medium includes the material, but also incorporates the methodological, the technique as well as the technology. This would include the code that is used to communicate information, as it is commonly understood that messages are encoded and decoded [2]. The code may be a language such as English, German, French, Hebrew, Hindi, or Mandarin; it may be a writing system that is logographic, syllabic, or alphabetic; it may be smoke signals, talking drums, semaphore flags, or Information 2012, 3 444 Morse code; it may be C++, HTML, Java, Python, or Perl, etc. Codes are also sometimes referred to as symbol systems, and more generally as symbolic form [5]. Thus, for example, Postman states that, “because of the symbolic forms in which information is encoded, different technologies have different intellectual and emotional biases.” [6] Symbolic form itself may be equated with form in general, or it may be seen as a special case of form as a more general phenomenon. Either way, in being typically distinguished from content, it follows that form is the equivalent of medium. Apart from the code, other formal elements that may be identified within a message include style, tone, arrangement, treatment, pattern, etc. While the word form is present within the larger term information, the meaning of information can be understood to refer to that which resides within form, inside form, as that which is given form, that which is placed in formation. 1.3. Information and Remediation The term information is commonly employed as a near synonym for content and message, but it can also be used to suggest something subordinate to the other two phenomena, as something contained within or carried by the content or message. Moreover, while form is in one sense an aspect of medium, it can also be regarded as part of the message. Formal elements such as the aforementioned style, tone, arrangement, treatment, pattern, etc., whether understood as aesthetic, poetic, or rhetorical, are sometimes viewed as aspects of a medium's content that in turn take information as their content. As Marshall McLuhan observed, a given medium can become the content of another medium [7], as for example, spoken language becomes the content of written texts, the manuscript becomes the content of print media, print media become the content of electronic text. A motion picture broadcast on television becomes the content of the television medium, while a television image incorporated into a cinematic film becomes the content of that movie. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin refer to this process as remediation [8], and when a physical medium is remediated by another medium, it loses its material quality and becomes a code or style, as for example when handwriting is transformed into a choice of typefaces or fonts. The process of remediation is the equivalent of the nesting of systems within systems, so that the single cell as a system is part of the larger organism as a system, which is part of the larger ecosystem. Along similar lines, McLuhan noted that when a new environment is introduced, the older environment becomes part of its content [7] (and recall here the definition of media ecology as the study of media as environments). 1.4. Relationship and Meaning McLuhan has been wrongly accused of claiming that content does not exist, which is absurd given that his argument is, in part, that content is influenced and shaped by the medium that is used [4,7]. What his observation does suggest, however, is that there are some instances when content may in fact be entirely reducible to medium. For example, the content of a given message can be said to be pure style or aesthetics, or it may be encoded in a language not known by the receiver, or the message may be nonsensical or so garbled as to be unintelligible (but in both cases still recognizable as a message). In such cases, we may rightly conclude that there is a message, but no information is present. Similarly, a message may be said to hold no information, for example if the same message is repeated over and over again, or if it is so entirely expected as to contain no new information (an obviously Information 2012, 3 445 problematic phrase, in that new information is redundant, and old information oxymoronic, except in the sense that information that is old to one party may be new to another, hence the expression, that’s news to me). Messages that contains no information can include those associated with ritual, including the everyday rituals of phatic communication (e.g., hello, how are you? fine, how are you?).
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