Architecture of theWorld WideWeb - Social Semantics: The Search for Meaning on the Web - page 36

the realization of digital information and give us the advantages that Haugeland
rightfully points out is the purpose of the digital: flawless copying and perfect
reliability in a flawed and imperfect world (1981).

2.2.6 Representations

A web-page about the Eiffel Tower seems to be an obvious representation. One
can sit at home on one's computer far away from Paris and access a web-page that
features a clear picture of - a representation! - of the Eiffel Tower. Furthermore,
others from Japan to Egypt should be able to access the exact same representation
by accessing the same URI. By claiming to be a “universal space of information,”
the Web is asserting to be a space where any encoding can be transferred about
any content (Berners-Lee et al. 1992). However, there are some distinct differences
between kinds of content, for some content can be distal and other content can
be local. Things that are separated by time and space are distal while those
things that are not separated by time and space are proximal . As synonyms for
distal and proximal, we will use non-local and local ,orjust disconnected and
connected . Although this may seem to be an excess of adjectives to describe a
simple distinction, this aforementioned distinction will underpin our notions of
representation. In a message between two computers, if the content is a set of
commands to 'display these bytes on the screen' then the client can translate these
bytes to the screen directly without any worry about what those bytes represent
to a human user. However, the content of the message may involve some distal
components, such as the string “The Eiffel Tower is in Paris,” which refers to many
things outside of the computer. Differences between receivers allow the self-same
content of a message to be both distal and local, depending on the interpreting agent.
The message to 'display these bytes on the screen' could cause a rendering of a
depiction of the Eiffel Tower to be displayed on the screen, so the self-same message
causes not only a computer to display some bytes but also causes a human agent to
receive information about what the Eiffel Tower in Paris looks like.
Any encoding of information that has distal content is called a representation ,
regardless of the particular encoding of the information. Representations are then
a subset of information, and inherit the characteristics outlined of all information,
such as having one or more possible encodings and often a purpose and the ability
to evoke normative behaviour from agents. To have some relationship to a thing that
one is disconnected from is to be about something else. Generally, the relationship
of a thing to another thing to which one is immediately causally disconnected is
a relationship of reference to a referent or referents , the distal thing or things
referred to by a representation . The thing which refers to the referent(s) we call
the 'representation,' and take this to be equivalent to being a symbol . Linguistic
expressions of a natural or formal language are called descriptions while the
expressions of an iconic language are called depictions . To refer to something is to
denote something, so the content of a representation is its denotation . In the tradition