Separating the Data From the Din : Much That Is Casually Classified as Information Is ‘Noise’

We hear with increasing frequency these days that we either live in or are about to enter an age of information. “The Coming Information Age” (1982), by Wilson P. Dizard, is just one of dozens of titles that thrust this thesis upon us. We don’t need to read the books to get the point.

If the folks who are predicting the age of information are right--and about some issues they certainly are--we’re going to need to make some adjustments. It would be fashionable to say we need to change our ways of thinking. But it would perhaps be more honest to say we need to start thinking about some matters we’ve taken for granted.

For instance, if information is the definitive concept of our age, we might be well served by taking a moment to ask just what it is.

Old Definitions

To inform originally meant “to give form to, to put into form or shape.” That is the first definition for the word in the Oxford English Dictionary, and information is correspondingly defined as “formation or molding of the mind or character.” Thus Edmund Spenser in “The Faerie Queen” (1590), writes that frogs spontaneously appear on the banks of the Nile, “Informed in the mud, on which the sun hath shyned.” And Richard Burton, in “The Anatomy of Melancholy” (1621): “If he made her . . . he may as cheap inform another.” William Tindale, in his 1526 translation of the Bible, casts St. Paul’s advice to fathers on the rearing of children in Ephesians 6:4 this way: “Bring them up in the nurture and information of the Lord.”

This use of inform in the sense of “give form to” has survived to the present day. For example, Etienne Gilson, a 20th-Century philosopher, writes: “The making of beauty consists in the progressive informing of a piece of freely chosen matter by the form present in the artist’s mind.”

In 1948, Claude Shannon, then a scientist at Bell Labs, published a paper, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” that laid the groundwork for the new science of information theory. The mathematical theory of information was built on a new definition of the term which has had enormous influence not only on communications and data processing but on biology, genetics, and a dozen other disciplines.

Information, Shannon asserted, is the reduction of uncertainty. By this definition, information becomes something that can be consistently measured, and hence accurately represented mathematically. The smallest unit of information is a bit , which is the amount of information that eliminates the smallest possible measure of uncertainty: the uncertainty we experience when there are only two options, each of which is equally probable.

Dispelling Uncertainty

If you have told me to go to the brown house on Mulberry Street, but when I arrive on Mulberry Street I find two brown houses, I am uncertain which one you meant. My uncertainty can be dispelled by a yes or no answer to the question “Is this the house?” Given that bit of information, no more uncertainty.

One of the great virtues of this definition of information is that it allows us to distinguish between information and noise. If you happen by while I am puzzling over which house to enter, I may ask you if this is the house where the Smiths live. If you respond, “I don’t know, but it’s certainly a lovely day,” your answer is noise rather than information. You haven’t reduced my uncertainty--I could tell for myself that it was a lovely day. This definition that allows us to separate information from noise has become a useful metaphor in all kinds of non-technical fields.

The older sense of information was founded in metaphysics. In the old usage, if I inform you I give you form, unity, quality. Information, on this model, is creative; it gives shape to substance. In the new usage, information is creative in a different sense. It reduces the possibilities of meaning and hence gives a foundation for building reliable knowledge.

I introduce these two respectable definitions of the term merely to call attention to the fact that in current usage we often ignore both of them.

Information is most often used to mean no more than data , what is given. Much that we honor with the word information these days serves neither to form and shape us as persons nor to reduce our level of uncertainty. That is to say, much that we casually classify as information is, in fact, noise. Don’t take my word for it. Turn on the television and prove it for yourself. Or go to the supermarket and look at the magazine rack. Are these precursors of the coming information age? Please stand by--let’s hope that we’re only experiencing technical difficulties.