Don asked if he could share my summary on the topic with confused students
(others have asked as well), and while I don't mind, please do alert them
that it is an INFORMAL exposition ... there are many gaps in the argument
and it is not meant to be even as rigorous as what a textbook would say.
What is sound is the basic contrast between information and meaning, but
the separate discussions of each are very incomplete.
On the topic of information, I think the clearest and most authoritative
discussion ... in the sense of something that is comprehensible to
non-experts and also carefully reasoned by someone who knows what the
experts know, is H. Ross Ashby _Introduction to Cybernetics_. It's old, but
good.
Another good person to read, for people looking to see how far the
cybernetics scheme can go in the direction of meaning is the later work of
Heinz von Foerster on second-order cybernetics; all his stuff is worth
reading.
Another key writer is Ludvig von Bertalanffy, who make the connections
between information and entropy, another very confusing subject.
The original sources, Shannon and Weaver, and Norbert Wiener are not very
useful to most students. And of course there is now a vast technical
literature on mathematical information theory that makes a zillion subtle
distinctions among different kinds of information and entropy "measures"
... some of which provide the links to the further subjects of fractals,
chaos theory, fuzzy set theory and its logic, etc.
I think there is a rich vein for semiotics to mine in exploring all these
wider connections of information theory ...
Don also asked about the emerging field of "informatics". Cybernetics is by
and large considered out of date today, at least as a fashionable buzzword.
Semiotics is still considered too esoteric and impractical, too theoretical
and abstract to attract large-scale interest or resources. So many of these
issues are now being subsumed under the new name informatics.
I believe that informatics originates in the French coinage, informatique,
and was an attempt to by-pass the Anglo "information science", seen as too
indebted to engineering and cybernetics and too littled graced by concerns
about philosophical and humanistic issues. Informatics today seems to be
mainly about the study of how people access and use information, and it
tries precisely to combine the cybernetic and semiotic paradigms, though
leaning a bit more to the former. It is about the interaction between
information technologies and human users, and so about the design and
institutional contextualization of such technologies for particular
categories of users. A major field today in the US is 'medical informatics'
which ranges from analyzing the semantics of medical classification to
designing user interfaces for physicians to get useful research information
relevant to patient cases.
Because informatics has tended toward the practical, toward an engineering
and design orientation, with just a touch of user (cognitive) psychology
(cf. our discussion here a while back on usability studies), it has largely
neglected the the social and cultural factors that a CHAT or social
semiotics approach would see as paramount. This has led to a small
counter-movement, social informatics, which tries to remedy this, and which
consequently deals with many of the same issues as CHAT, ANT, or social
semiotics. Someone like Leigh Star would be a link between xmca and the
social informatics community. Of course in this catalogue of cousins we
should also include HCI and sociocultural approaches to usability studies
within computer science and software design, or human factors engineering.
It will be a better world if we all learn a bit more about each other's
languages and take the time to read and talk more to one another, across
the cultural and historical divisions within our extended family.
JAY.
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JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
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