Introduction - Human Information Retrieval - page 2

Labor, choice, and technology are fundamental to human experience.
In the Judeo-Christian tradition, once out of Eden we are condemned to
labor and compelled to choose. Technology may have been noticed less
explicitly, but it is equally pervasive in post-Edenic experience, both as
agrarian and industrial—or productive —and information technologies.
Physical and mental labor are usually considered separately from each
other, but acknowledgment of the mental components of physical labor
and physical elements in mental labor have moved recently toward syn-
thesis, and an emerging view of intelligence concerns “quality of our
bodies as much as our minds” (Gosden 2003, 31-33, 119). Mental or
informational labor has been recognized as both an independent activ-
ity and an adjunct to obtaining physical control over the environment
(Webster 2002, 15). Types of mental labor have been differentiated,
with semantic labor distinguished from syntactic labor (Warner 2005a).
Classically from Aristotle, choice, or deliberation, is the product of men-
tal labor. Late-twentieth-century developments in information technol-
ogy constitute a revolution in the mechanization of mental labor (Minsky
1967, 2), embodied in the computer as a universal information machine
that developed from mid- and late-nineteenth-century antecedents in
special-purpose information machines. Both productive and information
technologies are human constructions—the products of human physical
and intellectual labor drawing upon natural resources and preexisting
human constructions (Warner 2004, 5-35). An understanding of infor-
mation retrieval constructed from labor, choice, and technology promises
to be deeply rooted in human experience and to offer a radical depth of
understanding.
Power in explanation can be demonstrated by the ability to absorb ele-
ments from previous models as special cases of the new model, indicative
of the history of a true science, while discarding those elements that have
obstructed understanding.
Existing Models
Information science has developed existing evaluative models that should
be absorbed into the new model and offer some elements for synthesis
and advancement, with diffusion into computer science, librarianship, and
indexing. Some discussions of the information society are concerned with