Читать книгу Living in Information - Jorge Arango - Страница 11

We need to take a step back here. I’ve said that physical environments convey information and serve as contexts where people convey information to each other, and that places are an information technology. I’ve also talked about “information environments,” and suggested they are different from physical environments. Before we go any further, we need to look more closely at this word “information” to make sure we’re on the same page.

You normally think of information as something you find in books, newspapers, and websites; the stuff in the world that adds to your knowledge. You talk about living in the “Information Age” and being “information workers”; your phones and computers are “information technologies.” But information is not only something you learn through books and websites, but it’s also part of your surroundings. In fact, you couldn’t make sense of the world without it. There’s information all around you at this very moment. So what is it?

You can think of information as anything that helps reduce uncertainty so that you can make better predictions about outcomes. That’s somewhat abstract, so let’s look at a pedestrian example. Every morning I walk my dog, Bumpkin, around our neighborhood. Most of the houses where we live have front yards. The owners of some of those houses have placed signs on their yards that look something like this:

Information happens.

IMAGE BY DAVID SWAYZE, VIA FLICKR, HTTPS://WWW.FLICKR.COM/PHOTOS/SWAYZE/3195122793

Whenever I encounter a yard with one of these signs on it, I know I shouldn’t allow Bumpkin to poop there. It’s not that he can’t poop there; physically nothing bars him from going on the yard. Rather, the sign helps me predict a likely outcome of my decision to let him do it; namely, having to deal with an irate homeowner.⁴ The sign provides information about that particular yard; it sets a value for an attribute of the yard that sets it apart from the others around it. (You could express it in pseudocode: PoopHere = FALSE.)

Note that this doesn’t mean the owners of yards that lack these signs think it’s OK to let dogs poop on them; they’ve taken no formal position on the matter one way or another.⁵ If I were to let Bumpkin poop in one of the yards with no signs, I could face an irate homeowner—or not. The yards with “no poop” signs on them have merely reduced my uncertainty on this matter with regard to that small part of the universe. Thus, they provide information that influences my actions when walking my dog.

It’s easy to see how signs provide information, but what about other aspects of the environment? You get lots of information from other parts of your surroundings that also influence your actions. For example, many of the forms around you have been designed to let you know how they are meant to be used. Consider how the entrance of most public buildings is carefully designed so that you can easily find it, even if you’ve never visited that particular building before.

Entrance to the High Court at Chandigarh, by Le Corbusier.

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Architects highlight the point of entry to a building by recessing openings, creating deep shadows with cantilevered roofs, breaking the rhythms of the facade, or changing the roofline, among other techniques. Even though these aren’t literal signs in the same way that the “no poop” signs are, they’re visual cues that tell you something is happening at that point in the structure. They help reduce your uncertainty, and hence improve your ability to act. They provide information.