Words defining words. Information was once just a word to me that i took for granted. It just was. It was just there and shared and accepted. I never realised the indepth complexities of  such a  simple word….until now. Being very overwhelmed by the amount of information about information, I did what all good educators should do (in my opinion) turn to the youth and the well matured in years people in your world. Using the subjective (knowledge of family and friends)  selection process over the objective (proven truth) avenue at this point in time.

What is information?

The 6 year old stated, after curiously asking about  the purpose of my question, ‘information is something you use to know things about lots of stuff’. This  further challenged me about information being a commodity, it is ‘something’. Information is not like any other trade or goods. It is not consumable,  It does not disappear. It can not be divided but if  all the information is not given it can change and morph into something new ( at times). It is not transferable, unfortunately you can’t unknow or delete information once you have it, it doesn’t matter how many people you tell and it is accumulative, it grows and develops and is used when useful. However, it is something you have just like other goods.

Turning to the slightly older, by 75ish years,  I was told that  ” information is transferring facts, making them  and interpreting them to make them  relevant to what you need at the time”

This lead to the discussion of my peers. Information is semantic – meaningful or classic –  measurable. It sits on the data knowledge continuum. It is one point between chaos and wisdom – a very fine line in my brain at times. Information has meaning but it must be measured or categorised into usefulness at that single moment in time to make it useful. The information hierarchy table shows that the information seeker must ‘do something with the information to make it information to the individual.

I’m not too sure if the idea of information is any clearer in my head but i feel i have knowledge and data to develop meaning and this will be/ is very useful when needed.