|
BOX 2.5
In addressing the question of how to provide every citizen access to the NII, we inevitably cast our questions, at least in part, in terms of information. We assume that citizens will use the NII to get to information, whether from relatively static information sources such as Web pages, databases, e-mail, newsgroup items, and files, or from more dynamic sources such as people, services, and computations. The interfaces we build for every citizen, and the research supporting their designs, will depend upon and be framed in terms of providing every citizen with access to information. The centrality of the notion of information to the development of research programs raises the question of whether the concept of information is well understood. If our understanding of this concept rested on foundations held in common and agreed upon by the joint community of researchers, funders, suppliers—of hardware, software, functionality, and content—and the users of interfaces, then one huge area of potential misunderstanding and difficulties could be regarded as safely under control. However, not only is there no such agreement, but many working in the fields that affect interface design and development do not even recognize that there is an issue here. Different communities use the term "information" presuming a certain meaning, without recognition of the alternatives or of the consequences of adopting a particular stance. Different conceptions of information lead to different questions, different approaches, and different ways of evaluating solutions. Given the scale and diversity of the NII, research agendas may have to be reexamined in light of the foundational assumptions they are making about information. In everyday conversation, "information" refers to facts or knowledge that may be acquired either directly by observation or indirectly by reading or hearing from another. Although there is allowance for error (e.g., "He gave me incorrect information," misinformation), there is usually some presumed authoritative source; the authority might derive from direct observation (and trusted senses) or from the reputation of the source. There are two predominant formal technical treatments of the concept, one from the mathematical theory of information, the other from philosophical work in semantics. These two treatments differ from the naive conception and from one another. 1. The mathematical theory of information is concerned with the amount of information and the accuracy with which it is transmitted. It does not consider meaning; neither what the information is "about" nor its truth (or falsity) are factors that play roles in the questions that information theory asks nor the techniques it develops. It is thus clear why the major impact of information theory is on issues of bandwidth, channel, and the like. 2. Philosophical-semantic treatments deal instead with content and meaning; their focus is on how to treat formally the concept that some entity (the sign or message) "carries the information that . . . . " * These theories are newer and less well developed than the theory of information. Although they deal explicitly with the "content" aspect of information, which is central to everyday use of the term and the ways in which "every citizen" will conceive of information for the NII, they do not address issues of how information is represented, encoded, or displayed, all of which are also of importance for ECIs. Furthermore, because they are grounded in "truth," they are unable to deal adequately with misinformation or with questions of authoritativeness.
A major issue for the NII, and certainly for ECIs for the NII, is understanding how these three different perspectives—everyday, mathematical, and philosophical-semantic—relate. Integration of these perspectives will be important for economic issues (which view information as a commodity to be paid for), legal issues (e.g., intellectual property rights), and control (e.g., personal view: ownership, conjoint the right to make change). Thus, the NII must ultimately deal with a conception of "information" that encompasses all facets of everyday use of the term. Both the mathematical and semantical theories can contribute to this understanding, but there are facets important to the NII that neither cover.
*A simple example of the concept, "X carries the information that Y," is "smoke carries the information that fire [is present]." Technically, the issue is that X counterfactually supports Y (i.e., if one has X, then one has Y and, furthermore, if Y weren't around, one wouldn't have X). SOURCE: Austin Henderson, Apple Computer Corporation. |