Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
the possibility of humanly reiterated and refined searches suggest that the
human capacity for choice resists reduction to computational models or
logical formulations.
1
From the perspective of automata studies, direct
human choice corresponds technically to a classic sense of nondetermin-
ism, similar to human intervention in moving a halted Turing machine
to another state. Diffusion (market adoption) of techniques strongly sug-
gests that information system consumers perceive their value (Swanson
1980).
We may have reached a practice plateau—a teleological or final stage
from the theoretical considerations developed. Denying that a teleological
stage has been reached would involve refuting some particularly strong
theories, rejecting the account of signification derived from Saussure,
denying information theory and its application to the syntactics of writ-
ten language, and refuting automata theory. The strength of the individual
theories is reinforced by their mutual convergence and by their closeness
to real-world practice.
Conclusion
The gestalt of the computer (Rosenberg 1974), understood here in the
sense of computational models and simulacra for human intelligence or
capacity for choice, is further but indirectly eroded. As early as 1956,
Shannon had disassociated himself from the uncritical analogical exten-
sion of information theory, while not excluding possibilities for develop-
ment:
[the] basic results of the subject [information theory] are aimed in a very specific
direction, a direction that is not necessarily relevant to such fields as psychol-
ogy, economics, and other social sciences. . . . I personally believe that many of
the concepts of information theory will prove useful in these other fields—and,
indeed, some results are already quite promising—but the establishing of such
applications is not a trivial matter of translating words to a new domain, but
rather the slow tedious process of hypothesis and experimental verification. If,
for example, the human being acts in some situations like an ideal decoder, this is
an experimental and not a mathematical fact, and as such must be tested under a
wide variety of experimental situations. (1956/1993, 462)
The decoder would act to transform a received signal into a message; this
process can be both directly humanly performed (for instance, by a Morse
