Information Is In The Eye Of The Beholder

Looking for more information gives you more information

Now that the Discovery is in orbit, the examination begins. Its 12½-day mission will be the most photographed in the history of the shuttle program, with all eyes on the craft to see if it suffered the kind of damage from blastoff debris that brought down the Columbia in February 2003.
But all this inspection may be a mixed blessing. The more NASA looks for damage, engineers and other experts say, the more it will find.
"How do you distinguish - discriminate - between damage which is critical and damage which is inconsequential?" asked Dr. David Wolf, an astronaut who spent four months aboard the Russian space station Mir. "We could be faced with very difficult decisions, in part because of all this additional information that we will be presented with."
"NASA faces a similar challenge, he said: "I'm sure they want to do the best they can. But the harder they look, they'll find more things."
Intense Hunt for Signs of Damage Could Raise Problems of Its Own. John Schwartz, NY Times, July 27, 2005

"Informativeness" depends on the reader

"Some of the paradoxes of becoming informed can be readily explained once variations in the reader's prior knowledge and cognitive skills are taken into account. For example, the very same book can be simultaneously highly informative and not-at-all informative on the same subject area. A textbook would be uninformative for an expert who is already familiar with the subject matter, but very informative to a novice." Michael K. Buckland, Library Services in Theory and Context Pergamon Press, 1983

Observers invent codes

"All of this is totally alien to what we (most of us working in cybernetics) have believed. Information, including codes and messages and mappings, was indeed for us the whole story of the viable system....The whole outlook turns out to be wrong....Nature is not about codes: we observers invent the codes in order to codify what nature is about." Sir Stafford Beer in "Preface", Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living by Humberto R. Maturana and Francisco J. Varela Reidel, 1980

No single view is privileged

Splitting. Screens. For Minds. Divided. By Caryn James. The NY Times, January 9, 2004

Since September 2001, when the crawl appeared and never left, a cluttered screen has become standard for cable news. CNBC usually shows two stock tickers, stock market averages and a talking head, with the speaker sometimes reduced to a passport-size photo in the corner of the screen.
But multiple screens have moved quickly into the arts and entertainment. Film and television screens crammed with text and images are everywhere from the Museum of Modern Art to "Access Hollywood."
Multiple images capture the fragmentation of our postmodern world, with its sense that truth is often subjective. The Figgis films work that way, as dazzling immersions into many points of view at once. But there are more practical reasons, as close by as your computer screen. Television and movies are echoing the cluttered screens of the Internet. Computer users are accustomed to Web sites set up for multiple-choice reading. Video-game players leap around the screen faster and faster. To young people raised with computers, it looks ordinary when MTV inserts an image teasing the next program inside the main screen.

Multiple views have advantages

"Advantages of views" We conclude this chapter with a brief summary of the advantages of views....They allow the same data to be seen by different users in different ways (at the same time). This consideration is obviously important when there are many different categories of user all interacting with a single integrated database. An Introduction to Database Systems, v. 1 C.J. Date Addison-Wesley, 1990

No single meaning is privileged

Jacques Derrida, 1930- French philosopher. He argues that language only refers to other language, therefore negating the idea of a single, valid “meaning” of a text as intended by the author. Rather, the author’s intentions are subverted by the free play of language, giving rise to many meanings the author never intended.
The Columbia encyclopedia, 6th ed., 2001.

Cookies facilitate the creation of personal views

Uses for Cookies So what's all the hoopla about? What good are cookies anyway? As it turns out, there are many excellent and well-meaning uses for cookies, including

Saving visitor preferences between visits
Personalizing the information that's displayed, like on MyYahoo!, My Netscape, or Excite

JavaScript: Concepts & Techniques: Programming Interactive Web Sites T.S. McDuffie Franklin, Beedle, 2003

Different styles are different views

"Keeping style out of the document enhances your presentation possibilities, since you are not tied to a single style vocabulary. Because you can apply any number of stylesheets to your document, you can create different versions on the fly. The same document can be viewed on a desktop computer, printed, viewed on a handheld device, or even read aloud by a speech synthesizer, and you never have to touch the original document source--simply apply a different stylesheet.Learning XML Erik T. Ray O'Reilly, 2003

Reading and re-reading create different views

"As can be inferred from its etymology, a cybertext must contain some kind of information feedback loop. In one sense, this holds true for any textual situation, granted that the 'text' is something more than just marks upon a surface. A reader peruses a string of words, and depending on the reader's subsequent actions, the significance of those words may be change, if only imperceptibly. The act of rereading is a crucial example: the second time we read a text, it is different , or so it seems" Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature Espen J. Aarseth The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997

More views are better

"Concepts and theories constitute a sort of lens through which we look at the world. If the Marxist perspective differs from others, it is because of a difference in the conceptual and theoretical apparatus employed to interpret experience, not because of a difference in location. And if we forget this, we are likely inadvertently to make a serious mistake. Different visual and social perspectives are not in conflict with each other even though what things look like from different perspectives differs enormously. Moving from one social location to another, one will see different things with varying apparent sizes and appearances, but these are just different aspects or sides of the whole complex of social life, and the more aspects or sides one can see, the better one's view of the world." Second-hand Knowledge: An Inquiry into cognitive authority Patrick Wilson Greenwood Press, 1983

Create views by reusing information

"Because information in your repository is stored as unique elements, you can use the same documents, chapters, sections, or content units in different deliverables. You can assemble compound documents built from smaller modules stored in the repository. You can update the modules and have the updates immediately reflected in all the compound documents that contain those modules. You can even modify a module in one set of compound documents without changing it in another set, at the same time maintaining a relationship by linking the two similar but not identical modules together. These strategies for reusing information are referred to as single sourcing." Content Management for Dynamic Web Delivery JoAnn T. Hackos Wiley, 2002

Views differ depending on time of day

"In this chapter, we'll go even further into scripting our Web pages as we see how to modify the actual HTML of a Web page in response to the user's actions. In other words, our HTML will become truly dynamic. We'll start by seeing how to create our entire Web page on the fly. Our first example is a Web page for a hypothetical Dynamic HTML airport, and we'll list flights out of our airport according to the time of day." Web Developer.com Guide to Dynamic HTML Steven Holzer Wiley, 1997

Different views of data can elucidate or obscure

"When we reason about quantitative evidence, certain methods for displaying and anlyzing data are better than others. Superior methods are more likely to produce truthful, credible, and precise findings. The difference between an excellent analysis and a faulty one can somtimes have momentous conseuqnces."

"This chapter examines the statistical graphical reasoning used in making two life-and-death decisions: how to stop a cholera epidemic in London during September 1854; and whether to launch the space shuttle Challenger on January 28, 1986. By creating statistical graphics that revealed the data. Dr. Johjn Snow was able to discover the cause of the epidemic and bring it to an end. In contrast, by fooling around with displays that obscured the data, those who decided to launch the space shuttle got it wrong, terribly wrong. For both cases, the consequences resulted directly from the quality of methods used in displaying and assessing quantitative evidence." Visual explanations Edward R. Tufte Graphics Press, 1997

Views are cultural artifacts

"The most profound threat to the idea that there can be a science of visualization originates with Saussure. He defined a principle of arbitrariness as applying to the relationship between the symbol and the thing that is signified. Saussure was also a founding member of a group of structuralist philosophers and anthropologists who, although they disagreed on many fundamental issues, were unified in their general insistence that truth is relative to its social context. Meaning in one culture may be nonsense in another. A trash can as a visual symbol for deletion is meaningful only to those who know how trash cans are used." Information visualization: Perception for Design Colin Ware Morgan Kaufmann, 2000

There's always an intended view

"Excuse me for saying so, but there is no such thing as 'unstructured information.' Even the simplest kind of information has a sequence in which there is a beginning, a middle, and an end, some concept of unit, and, usually, several hierarchical levels of subunits. Information always has at least one intended mode of interpretation, and the interpretability of information is always utterly dependent on the interpreter's ability to detect structure." A Perspective on the Quest for Global Knowledge Interchange Steven R. Newcomb, Chapter 3 of XML Topic Maps: Creating and Using Topic Maps for the Web, edited by Jack Park. Addison-Wesley, 2003

Views depend on rods and cones in your eyes

"The distribution of cones is uneven, with the largest percentage located in the fovea centralis, where there is a cone density of 232,500 per square inch. This raises one of the major problems with color vision; because cones are mainly concentrated in only a small area of the eye, most of the color we see is actually imagined." The Complete Guide to Digital Color: Creative Use of Color in the Digital Arts Chris Linford HarperCollins, 2004

I could continue assembling more examples of how information depends on a view, but - hey! - my favorite TV program was going to start in a minute so I quit at this point. If you want more examples, just ask.