Our group question this week concerned the play Waiting for Godot. The questions centered on whether or not the “information” would differ if the medium was the text of the play versus a performance and whether or not a reading of the text would produce different information for two individuals.
It is often difficult to navigate when dealing with specific definitions of similar concepts and the material this week is a perfect example. As the chapter defines “data” as a way of representing facts, I think I would have called it symbolism…likewise I think I would have called information which the chapter describes as “aggregated data, which become information when processed by the human mind,” perception.
I would have described how we use symbols to represent things that we observe and when those symbols are understood in a framework they would become data and when that data is processed by our mind it would become perception…
But not only does this illustrate how “information” can differ for individuals depending on perspective it also shows how important “literacy” (the framework by which we understand a set of data) is.
I’m going to stop here before I start to confuse myself…
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Good Shawn, by challenging the course concepts, you in a sense proved them, and managed to capture an essence of Waiting for Godot all at the same time. Bravo. The book defines information so many ways, but we have agreed, or I have let you know and not given you the option of objecting, that the definition we will use is the one about aggregated data changing the knowledge state. Can you call that perception? Absolutely. The key is simply creating a common literacy to facilitate communication in order to reduce the noise from sender to receiver. If we “agree” on standard definitions, then we are better able to communicate messages back and forth without misinformation happening. In our own minds we can think of them however we want, I’m sure some people have labeled the entire information pyramid as dull, dull, dull. :)
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