The present text is an enriched version of the original one. I have added some later insights without changing the basic ideas which I still think are valuable and can also be of help when reflecting, for instance, about the nature of communicating and searching for information in the Internet. They also point to a third issue one which in my opinion is central and underlies the other two namely, the interaction between society and information systems. I take a restrictive view of the second question by analyzing the hermeneutical components of the interaction between an inquirer or user and data bases. With regard to the last issue, I contrast the whole field of the technological instrumentation of information with a non-instrumental but at the same time highly productive view of human language.
Information is the shape of knowledge at the end of modernity.
All these positions, especially the third, were core discoveries of Husserl. They are also fundamental characteristics of the phenomenon of information, so that information can be described as the shape of knowledge at the end of modernity. First, with regard to the abandonment of the primacy of scientific rationality, information is admitted to be fragmentary, to come in pieces. Knowledge becomes, literally, partial, dependent on prejudices or on the knower's frame of reference. Second, with regard to the abandonment of the subjectivity-objectivity opposition, information is described as having a certain commonality .