Information Technology Reference
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with humans as they go about their tasks in situ. In other words, books, DVDs, and databases do
not contain information; they contain data. But information can result or emerge from the inter-
action of the data-carrying entity with a human. Humans can exploit the information potential of
data objects only if they have the intelligence or capability to do so, and some of this capability is
technological, though the majority of it is probably psychological. A topic in a language you can-
not read has significantly less data that you can exploit for information purposes than a topic in
your own language. But note that even such a topic has some information potential for you, since
your experience of topics will undoubtedly lead you to conclude that this artifact possesses the
capability to inform by virtue of its scriptlike qualities and ordered structure.
By extension, the information potential of any one data source will vary tremendously across
the user population. Different users' different needs for the same data set will drive their exami-
nation and interpretation processes in distinct ways. This is the classic task effect with which we
are all so familiar in systems design and evaluation. But beyond task differences, the psychologi-
cal makeup of any one user is unique, so, at a very personal level, there will always be many dif-
ferent ways in which information is viewed, even by users performing the same tasks with the same
data set and artifact. Furthermore, users are not isolated beings. There is always a strong contextual
element to data exploration and interpretation, which ensures that information must be conceived
of in terms of its occurrence of use, and the organizational, social, and cultural milieu in which
use is made.
RETHINKING INFORMATION AS PRODUCT WITH POTENTIAL
Product with purposive process might be more neatly thought of as “product with potential,” an
approach that aims to overcome the forced separation of information into objects (products) or
acts (processes) by advancing a view of information as the emergent property resulting from the
purposing of these two elements into a meaningful context.
Equating information with products is an old habit, enforced by years of emphasis within the
information world on collecting and storing data. While this has given rise to established methods
and procedures in the collection and management realm, there has been a lack of commensurate
theoretical and methodological development in the process aspects of information making.
What are labeled in Figure 2.1 as the “arc of interpretation” and “arc of exploration” are funda-
mentally psychological phenomena that can be difficult to measure. Indeed, despite the routine
use of “comprehension” as a measure of student performance in our universities, cognitive scien-
tists do not even agree that the process can be defined. The point here though, is that our views of
information have tended to be heavily one-sided, led by an objectification of the concept coupled
with a weakly articulated assumption of the necessary human processing involved.
The term “mediation” is used in Figure 2.1 to highlight the often-essential role of some mech-
anism for translation between data and a human. Information technology is one such mediator,
but it is not the only kind. Other experts, information specialists, coworkers, and the like can all
serve as mediators in some contexts. However, for purposes of the present discussion, information
technology is the primary mediator of interest. Thus, such technology carries, stores, retrieves,
and presents data. It can provide a physical instantiation of data or the mechanism for making vis-
ible or audible the data of interest. Without this, it is not clear that we truly have an instance of
information exchange. This is an important distinction. People can communicate directly with
each other and we often talk of this as the exchange of information, but it is not clear that infor-
mation has truly been exchanged. Data has certainly passed between the communicants, but this
is not alone a sufficient basis for us to consider the process informational in a form that we would
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