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 . Information is something basically human which should be in principle accessible to everyone.
Modern knowledge is something common, shared by a community, for instance by a scientific community.
Third, with regard to the abandonment of the idea that knowledge is something separate from the knower, there is the notion of mediation . Modern information technology disseminates all kinds of knowledge all the time to everyone in a way prefigured by printing. Information becomes part and parcel of media, becomes a medium. In sum, the characteristics of fragmentation, commonality, and mediation point toward the nature of information, its present shape at the end of modernity. In setting up for example a bibliographic database, the fragmentation of information forces us to create the conditions of possibility for the retrieval of the pieces because their common context remains tacit.