Information and Knowledge

Information is not knowledge. The Tyranny of Light: The Temptations and The Paradoxes of the Information Society is a chapter in the book Complex Knowledge.

The advent of telecommunications has brought about the uncoupling of  space  and time and led to what Thompson (ibid. 32) calls ‘despatialized simultaneity’: it is now possible for one to experience events as simultaneous without being close to where they happen. In a society of generalized communication the world tends to be experienced as information; namely, as a collection of codified, abstract, decontextualized representations  (Lash2002). 

The advent of a society obsessed with information tends to conceive of communication in terms of what Reddy calls the “conduit metaphor’  ideas are thought to be like objects that can be sent though a channel of distribution ( a conduit) to a recipient , who recovers them in their original form.

Is all knowledge is reduced to information—if, in other words, ‘to know’means having information on the variation of certain indicators thought to capture the phenomenon at hand, our knowledge of the phenomenon itself risks becoming problematic.

 The information representing a phenomenon and the phenomenon itself are not identical- the map is not the territory.   Any phenomenon is given in a mixture of presence and absence – what is and what might be.

To sum up, the information society tempts us into thinking in an objectivist manner about the world. First, the world, social and natural alike, is thought of as consisting of items of information—decontextualized representations—and we get to know the world through layers of abstract representations about the world. This is what I have called here ‘information reductionism’. Second, information is seen through the lenses of the conduit metaphor: information is supposed to be objective and exist independently of human agents. And third, in an information-rich society social engineering tends to be the dominant form of policy-making: the world is thought to be rationally governable primarily through the collection, processing, and manipulation of the necessary information about it.