What Would You Consider to Be the Advantages and Disadvantages of the ‘Information Society’ to Which We Belong?

This chapter deals with the essence of information, how one acquires it, what one does with it, and how one makes decisions based on the information at hand. This fact is so basic and important, yet one can take this for granted. Wrong judgments and decisions occur when one needs to make a decision

Information Management has to do with capturing information, efficient planning, organizing and evaluating the information to interpret for an organization to make well informed decisions. (Hinton, 2006) The main reason organizations depend on information is to improve its overall management in

What Postman does mean in saying, “the medium is the metaphor,” is that the way information

Enlightening on the fact that information is available when and where ever people want it, at the touch of a finger people can obtain any information necessary, making American’s think that they are learning, as McCullough states. McCullough then professes, information is not learning, intelligence, common sense, kindness, good judgment, imagination, sense of humor, courage, and it isn’t explaining right from wrong. He suggests the knowledge of Connecticut’s square mileage, the dates of the signing on whichever United Nations Charter, or the height a flea can jump may be helpful, but is also not

Information is made from Data that is numerical which is changed and used to make it seem sense. For an example train timetable, the number of trains and how much it weights.

Information can be relative to anything with regards to an organisation. When it comes to customers, it can be their address, telephone number or outstanding payments, when it comes to employees, it can be their appraisals, salaries, again their address and telephone numbers, and for the business, it can be the business’s finances, profits, employee and customer details, and various other information.

- Information: is a knowledge which can be transferred or received concerning a particular fact or situation. And is a sequence of symbols that can be explained as a message. Information can be recorded as signs, or transmitted as signals.

Information Management is the collection and management of information from one or more sources and the distribution of that information to one or more audiences.

Information is data that has been processed so that it has meaning and value to a recipient,

Knowledge is the framework for understanding information and using it to inform judgements, opinions, predictions and decisions – a pyramidal relationship (See diagram 1)

Information is data which is accurate and timely specific and organized for a purpose presented within a context that gives it meaning and relevance. Information can lead to an increase in understanding and decrease in uncertainty.

Information is the thing that differentiate people from different creatures. It is the means by which we comprehend the world in which we live in and communicate with consistently. It is not a hunch, or an educated guess, but rather it is the comprehension of the information behind a truth or a subject. Understanding and knowledge go as an inseparable unit. From that point we can expand upon that understanding to guard and share it. In the past, knowledge could be viewed as significant refined data and prepared information." This is what Weinberg believes in Chapter One of Too Big To Know. He believes that knowledge can be formed by understanding and analyzing the data that eventually add a great value to our way of thinking and perceiving

Everything conveys information because it is the way that something or someone interprets anything. A shiver is your body interpreting the information from the icy touch of a cold winter wind. The sense of majesty you feel when you watch a sunset over the Pacific Ocean is your eyes interpreting the information from light bouncing off of objects around you. In this way, information is the context of reality. Through interpretation of information, we are able to make sense of the world.

However, according to Shannon himself, what really launched him into the theorization of information was Ralph Hartley’s paper Transmission of Information. This paper developed “a measure of information that could in principle be used for discrete or continuous signals.” Hartley’s publication also proved that a channel’s bandwidth defines how much information can be sent through it. Since a channel’s bandwidth was limited and since continuous signals could be broken down in small steps before being sent through the channel, Hartley concluded that if the steps were small enough, the approximated signal would be not only close but identical to the original signal. Finally, Hartley realized that information could be the “resolving of uncertainty.” He developed a mathematical formula according to this concept to quantify the amount of information in a message but unfortunately, this formula was not complex enough and could not be applied to cases in which the constituents of a message did not have all the same chances of being selected. Indeed, “in written English for instance, some letters are used more frequently than others.” Hartley’s formula would not work when trying to encode sentences for example because he couldn’t model the fact that the letter E had more chances to be selected than any other.

Information theory: the backbone of modern communication. Before Claude Shannon published his groundbreaking paper A Mathematical Theory of Communication, information as a quantity was poorly understood. A Mathematical Theory of Communciation put forth the foundation of information theory, the mathematical study of information and its properties (Cruise, 2014e). Through information theory, scientists and mathematicians have created quantative measures of structural complexity, compressability, communication complexity, and information content, providing a scholarly way