Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
and product did not fully separate from labor. A distinction of syntac-
tics from semantics could be recovered but is not strongly marked in oral
societies.
For information systems under written literacy or premodernity, selec-
tion labor progressively separated into description and search labor, and
search labor emerged as the work involved in traversing or searching the
products of description labor.
Selection labor
separates into
description labor and search labor.
Analytically and substantively, selection labor represents the sum of
description and search labor following separation. The historical sepa-
ration of description and search labor from selection labor supports the
proposition that selection labor can be distributed between description
and searching. Separating products from labor introduces the possibility
of distributing the products of description labor (catalog records, cata-
logs, and bibliographies); human labor congeals in those products. We
can also delegate aspects of description processes to clerical human labor,
with that labor assisted by technologies associated with writing as well as
by special-purpose information machines that produce and sort written
utterances.
Under modernity, the possibility and actuality of transferring syntactic
labor to technology sharpens the distinction between semantic and syn-
tactic labor for both description and search labor.
Description labor
separates into
description labor semantic and descrip-
tion labor syntactic.
Search labor
separates into
search labor semantic and search labor syn-
tactic.
The semantic aspects of description and search labor, including the under-
standing of syntactic processes, remain irreducibly and directly human.
Description labor semantic
➞
human labor.
Search labor semantic
➞
human labor.
Previously conducted by direct human work, we can now transfer the syn-
tactic aspects of description and search processes to information technol-
ogies, predominantly to the computer as a universal information machine
programmed to function as an appropriate special-purpose information
machine.
