Institutional Circuitry: Thinking about the Forms and Uses of Information

We have been asked to speculate upon the future of information, and I would like to begin by funpacking some of the assumptions bound up in this phrase, "the future of information." The word "information" is grammatically a mass noun, like "milk," "flour," and "money." Information is thus a figurative substance (cf. Buckland 1991), and consequently we can tell certain stories about it: possession, accumulation, surfeit ("overload"), distributional inequality ("haves and have-nots"), measurement (Shannon and Weaver 1949), commoditization (Schiller 1993), and so on. In order to tell these stories about information, we must imagine it to have a location. Yet we have also come to understand information as a "content" divorced from any specific physical realization (speech, paper, computer chips, fiber optic cables). We imagine information to be referential--information is always information about something--and we imagine it to be truth-functional--we assume that information is true but we know it can be false. At the same time, the term "information" rarely evokes the troubling questions of epistemology that are usually associated with terms like "knowledge" and "belief." The concept of information, then, carries a certain connotation of neutrality--it is homogenous and noncontroversial. The reality, of course, is more complicated. To speak of the future of information, furthermore, supposes that information has a definite character that can change. Indeed, it supposes that information is a unified phenomenon with a single fate. To the extent that its future is already determined (if perhaps undisclosed), we are in the position of passively predicting it rather than actively making it ourselves. The idea is that, by predicting the future of information, we can prescribe a future for librarianship. I want to suggest, though, that things actually work the other way round. Information is not a natural category whose history we can extrapolate. Instead, information is an object of certain professional ideologies, most particularly librarianship and computing, and cannot be understood except through the practices within which it is constructed by the members of those professions in their work. The future of librarianship is not contingent on the future development of something called information; to the contrary, the category of "information" is contingent on the future development of the various institutions that now constitute it. The category of information may disappear entirely, or it may be reconfigured as structural relationships change between the "information professions" and the other institutions of society. To understand this process, much less intervene in it, we must comprehend the system of dynamic tensions through which "information" is constituted in the present day This is a difficult task since ideologies invariably present their constituent categories as natural and pregiven, and not as the contingent products of human activity But it is a necessary task if information professional wish to maintain their relevance to the deeper social values that give their work meaning. Librarians understand themselves as experts on the use of information. This definition of librarianship is strategic. It is preferable, for example, to defining the profession and its expertise in terms of particular media: books, bound journals, long-playing records, and so on. The rate of migration of these materials to digital media is no doubt often exaggerated, but everyone understands that these media are technologies like any others, that specific technologies come and go, and that something important about the skill of librarianship would survive their demise. But the concept of "information" is strategic in another, more significant way. Libraries serve a great diversity of patrons; indeed, the encouragement of social pluralism through public access to information is often cited as a central value of the profession (Dervin 1994). …