Murdock\’s Lies and the Representation of Information, by Australian professor Gordon Fletcher, takes a critical, postmodern view of the recent question, \”What is Information?\” Information Theory has encouraged us to look at information as something uniform, but this distracts us from what is actually represented by it. This paper looks at examples of information as artefacts, from a material culture perspective, and as stories, all with the point of providing insight into the social nature of what now circulates electronically in commodified form.
Go ahead for an excerpt from the conclusion:
Murdock\’s Lies and the Representation of Information, by Australian professor Gordon Fletcher, takes a critical, postmodern view of the recent question, \”What is Information?\” Information Theory has encouraged us to look at information as something uniform, but this distracts us from what is actually represented by it. This paper looks at examples of information as artefacts, from a material culture perspective, and as stories, all with the point of providing insight into the social nature of what now circulates electronically in commodified form.
Go ahead for an excerpt from the conclusion:Information is never trivial, it is not \’just\’ lumps of binary or analogue data. Information is always social. As with all stories and artefacts, what information reveals about human practice and experience extends beyond the immediate surfaces of function and form. Understanding information, however, is a path negotiated between the philosophy of an essential informational \’element\’ and the discovery of utter specificity in its contextualised experience. There is no pure information. What is present is the intersection of practices, contexts, proxemics and provenance. In some situations, however, and with the right story, these intersection can assume the illusion of an objective state.
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