Still Minding the Gap? Reflecting on Transitions between Concepts of Information in Varied Domains

Abstract

This conceptual paper, a contribution to the tenth anniversary Special Issue of Information, gives a cross-disciplinary review of general and unified theories of information. A selective literature review is used to update a 2013 article on bridging the gaps between conceptions of information in different domains, including material from the physical and biological sciences, from the humanities and social sciences including library and information science, and from philosophy. A variety of approaches and theories are reviewed, including those of Brenner, Brier, Burgin and Wu, Capurro, Cárdenas-García and Ireland, Hidalgo, Hofkirchner, Kolchinsky and Wolpert, Floridi, Mingers and Standing, Popper, and Stonier. The gaps between disciplinary views of information remain, although there has been progress, and increasing interest, in bridging them. The solution is likely to be either a general theory of sufficient flexibility to cope with multiple meanings of information, or multiple and distinct theories for different domains, but with a complementary nature, and ideally boundary spanning concepts.

A possible conceptualization of the information systems (IS) artifact: A general systems theory perspective1

“…However, regardless of the role it plays in the IS artifact system, the fundamental salience of information is in ensuring orderly and harmonized interactions between the social and the technical components, that is, reducing the uncertainty (entropy) in the IS artifact system. Indeed, given the varied conceptions of information, understanding it as a contributor to reduced entropy has been proposed to be a unified understanding of information (Bawden & Robinson, 2020).…”

On thresholds: signs, symbols and significance

“…Library and information science (LIS) as a discipline, for instance, can be said to be based on certain symbolic boundaries constructed historically from the rationalization and reification of “information” as a thing of particular value to the human intellect that can be described, stored and retrieved, allowing the discipline to make rapid progress in conjunction with various technological advances, its own discourse largely centered on the study of documents and domains, data and metadata in relation to user needs. LIS theorists, however, are continually testing these boundaries, with such recent contributions as Bates's (2022) proposal for a completely new information proto-paradigm, Hjørland's (2021) call for a more rigorous approach to the evaluation of information organization and retrieval to be based on the philosophy of science and Bawden and Robinson's (2020) overview of gaps between disciplinary views of information and contemporary efforts being made to bridge these.…”

Beyond disclosure: the role of self-identity and context collapse in privacy management on identified social media for LGBTQ+ people

“…According to the notion “networked privacy” proposed by Marwick and Boyd (2011), individuals lack enough control over how and what information about them is shared online, and that privacy is managed by the mediation of communication tools and communities. Furthermore, this study also hopes to respond to Bawden and Robinson's (2019) call for an attempt to situate privacy research within the framework of information behavior and communication theory and to better focus on the issue of informational privacy in specific contexts and for specific groups. The rest of the paper is organized as follows.…”