

When Was the Age of Information? - benbreen
http://jhiblog.org/2015/08/17/when-was-the-age-of-information/

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kijin
> _An emic approach ... considering what historical actors “rather than the
> present author or his readers” considered to be “knowledge.”_

The "emic approach" may be helpful if your plan is to study how people from
other times thought about their own life and work. It's a nice way to get
yourself fully immersed in a different world. But by focusing too much on what
those people _actually_ thought, it risks leaving out all the unacknowledged
and unrecorded assumptions that lubricated their society. Some of those things
only become apparent when you are far enough from the scene.

There is "information" as it objectively exists and functions in the universe.
Then there is "information" as it is subjectively acknowledged and exploited
by any given person or society at any given time. The two are related but not
identical. Both are interesting and important to study. It's okay if you want
to focus on one more than the other, but there is no need to disparage the
other.

~~~
cgio
What is the objective existence of information and how is it different from
signal?

~~~
ArkyBeagle
Information is always measurable in bits. I am not sure that all signals are
always measurable in bits.

Prior to the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, Egyptian hieroglyphics were
signals without information - no decoder existed. Ironically, the number of
bits needed to encode all Egyptian hieroglyphics would have been calculable (
presumably the alphabet was finite ) , but they could not have been decoded.

