3.7 Information

The word information is frequently used in daily life. As a way of transmitting information from one to another, conversation is perceived as a type of activity. It can be conversation via speech as well as via written text to communicate with another. In communication, they use certain kind of expression such as sound and symbol. Commonly, information is recognised as what’s speeched out of one’s mouth or expressed in a written form, contrary to the background or context which is not included in those expressions. In thinking about expression, it is inevitable to care about not only what’s visible which appears in the form of expression but also what’s invisible, caring about the context of expression.

The definition of the word “Exformation is the discarded information, everything we do not actually say but have in our heads when or before we say anything at all”(1). In contrast with the concept of information which is what is communicated in the expression, exformation is what is not communicated in the expression. To recognise the concept simply, in the situation that two persons make a conversation, what they speech is the information and what they don’t speech is the exformation. The exformation could be the context in which those two persons converse, or, I would say, it is not necessarily be the communal, or shared, context. Exformation is the information discarded in the conversation among them.

On information, some knew that “information is closely related to entropy, which is a measure of disorder”(2). The concept of entropy came from thermodynamics to information theory(3). Even though “Information is something to be found in bulk in a state where entropy is great”(4) and “more information in disorder than in order”(5), far from Claude Shannon there were others headed to the idea of “Information is order”(6).

Look at speech, utterance of words out of one’s body is to convey just a tiny part of the information, there’s a vast amount of context discarded behind. Society would need to have the mutual understanding on the limitation or the fundamental of communication and symbols. One of the fundamental aspects regarding communicating via symbols is context.

When people converse, it is not guaranteed that the receiver has the enough background knowledge in their head to be able to be on the same conversation with the speaker. However, it may not be necessarily important to have the same background of conversation. What’s uttered by another could trigger the curiosities towards the world, which can be expressed that “The least interesting aspect of good conversation is what is actually said. What is more interesting is all the deliberations and emotions that take place simultaneously during conversation in the heads and bodies of the conversers”(7). In addition, even after the conversation ended, often the curious parts continue to influence them. The exformation is not what everyone can understand the same degree as their background cannot be totally same. Exformation attracts people. The background of a work is often curiously looked at such as the biography of the artist, the environment in which the work was created, what was the motivation which drove the author to create the work.

Besides the recognition that each person has different context in ultimate sense, the inspiration of ideas occurs when their context is different. This applies to reading book. It is not only to read what’s written in a book, but to think what’s not written in the book. What one expresses is interpreted in a number of ways which vary depending on its circumstance.

The statement of, for instance, saying that today is good weather as greeting to another can be interpreted in a variety of ways. When one spoke of that statement to another in a sunny day, it would be perceived as just a greeting. Another case is that one said that in a rainy day truly thinking that rainy day is good weather to another with speaker’s personal preference, however the receiver of that conversation is not aware of speaker’s rainy day preference and it may make him perceive that it is ironically said to him in the connotation with its history of whenever one meets him it rains.

Exformation at least somewhat contributes to the definition of information. Regarding the relationship between words and context, “Words are written in a context. If they have meaning, they have meaning because of that context”(8). The meaning of signs is decoded by surrounding.

Vast amount of information is discarded, compared with the information written in text. Having mutual understanding that there’s a vast amount of information discarded helps people avoid causing misunderstanding or miscommunication among them.

In the world where information can be spread rapidly, the pieces are read by peoples of different regions, contexts. Even before, many consumed information by reading newspapers, books, conversations, to name a few. Over the past years, new medium emerged. Weblog was a sphere where citizens can post what they would like to share, sometimes for changing their world better, in other times for leaving their comments as records. In the beginning of 2020s, the word influencer, a person who gains influence on the Internet and influence the world, got popular. However, it would be rather said that most of them don’t seem influencing for the public good, in some cases just for trying to gain profits for themselves. Their influence is visible in numbers, how many follows them, their posts are liked by their audience and so forth. Numbers are abundant in people’s life. Things are trying to be mathematised. It became in 2010s on the Internet that people are fanatic to get the numbers, or attentions from the Internet users. It went negative too that uploaders went quite extreme end, often, without having care about the public goods in their posts. People are not able to focus on things in the long run. Additionally, people call for particular movement which uses specific hashtag words or phrases to assemble people in support of their movement.

As technology developed, people came to be more near-sighted, this is what people are not able to think in the long run. Focusing too much on the present feels like people are floating on the waves created by themselves. Their feet are not on the ground and they are easily wavered. What enriches is the sight in the long term.

Even though the information that can be shared in language is limited in the first place, social media is more limited in sharing the context. Setting aside the question of whether people in general read long pieces of information in their life regularly in the first place, the tendency arising out of the beginning of 21^st century that by uploading posts of shorter passages or video clips, the uploaders intend to gain their profit and get the number of views.

(1) Tor Nørretranders, The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size (NewYork: Penguin Books, 1999), p.95.

(2) Tor Nørretranders, The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size (NewYork: Penguin Books, 1999), p.31.

(3) Tor Nørretranders, The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size (NewYork: Penguin Books, 1999), p.38.

(4) Tor Nørretranders, The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size (NewYork: Penguin Books, 1999), p.42.

(5) Tor Nørretranders, The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size (NewYork: Penguin Books, 1999), p.42.

(6) Tor Nørretranders, The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size (NewYork: Penguin Books, 1999), p.42.

(7) Tor Nørretranders, The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size (NewYork: Penguin Books, 1999), p.94.

(8) Lawrence Lessig, Fidelity & Constraint: How the Supreme Court Has Read the American Constitution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), p. 55.