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From the Tannhäuser Gate to z8_GND_5296: A Day Trip on the Life-Cycle of Information

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Understanding Information

Part of the book series: Advanced Information and Knowledge Processing ((AI&KP))

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Abstract

Modern-day computer power is a great servant for today’s information hungry society. The increasing pervasiveness of such powerful machinery greatly influences fundamental information processes such as, for instance, the acquisition of information, its storage, manipulation, retrieval, dissemination, or its usage. Information society depends on these fundamental information processes in various ways. This chapter investigates the diverse and dynamic relationship between information society and the fundamental information processes just mentioned from a modern technology perspective.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    There is no general definition for the phenomenon termed ‘information society’. This chapter incorporates a view mentioned by Floridi (2010, pp. 3–18), who comments on information society as a society in which human progress and welfare seems to depend on the efficient management of the so-called ‘life-cycle’ of information. Section 1.3.1 provides further details on this life-cycle.

  2. 2.

    Voyager the Interstellar Mission. http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/. Accessed: 2016-11-14.

  3. 3.

    In terms of timing, it is necessary to highlight that accurate dating of cave paintings is a fairly difficult task. Until very recently, the cave paintings in Chauvet Cave in France have been considered to be the oldest examples of cave art in Europe. Recent discoveries in El Castillo Cave in northern Spain, however, suggest that the earliest examples of European cave art date back to as early as 48,000 years ago. From an information perspective such a finding is crucial. It may suggest that painting caves was not only part of the cultural repertoire of the first modern humans in Europe, but that Neanderthals, perhaps, also engaged in early human symbolic behavior (Pike et al. 2012).

  4. 4.

    In addition, Wiener (1961, p. 132) also clearly comments on the unique character of information in his famous quote that: ‘Information is information, not matter or energy’. Note that later in this section, we are going to pick up on this property of information again.

  5. 5.

    At the time of this writing, the Sunway TaihuLight spearheads the list of the Top 500 Supercomputers at http://www.top500.org/. On this site, the performance of this supercomputer is given as 93 petaflop/s (quadrillions of calculations per second) on the Linpack benchmark.

  6. 6.

    Quite naturally, this text can only provide a very short introduction to these fascinating topics. A reader with a wider interest in these topics, may find the following resources rewarding. The textbooks by Wright (2007) and Press and Williams (2010) describe the rise of the value of information through the ages, while the philosopher (Floridi 2011), one of the founders of the field of the ‘philosophy of information’, provides a sound treatment of the topic of information from a meta-physical, physical, and societal point of view. The books by Cohen (1996) or Jones and Jones (2000) may be useful for those readers with an interest in the theory of computing, or the mathematical theory of information, respectively. Our own work also provided various treatments of related concepts such as intelligent computing (Schuster 2007), or artificial intelligence (Schuster and Yamaguchi 2011), for instance.

  7. 7.

    Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The Diaphoric Definition of Data. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/information-semantic/#1.3. Accessed: 2016-11-14.

  8. 8.

    The Information Philosopher. http://www.informationphilosopher.com/knowledge/information.html. Accessed: 2016-11-14.

  9. 9.

    Google Knowledge Graph. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmQl6VGvX-c. Accessed: 2016-11-14.

  10. 10.

    Please note that in the time of the digital revolution this does not prevent researchers from using powerful computers, in order to attempt to prove the existence of God, who, according to the beliefs of the mathematician Kurt Gödel, is a being who possesses all positive properties (Benzmüller and Woltzenlogel Paleo 2013).

  11. 11.

    Please note that we are again aware of the distinction between naturally produced records (e.g., the distinct layers of sediment or soil that make the Earth’s strata) and records produced intentionally by intelligent human beings (e.g., a library, or a photo album). The focus here is on the latter form of production again.

  12. 12.

    Perhaps, at this stage, it is meaningful to mention the work of the German philosopher Byung-Chul Han, who provides a rich treatment of various aspects (digital communication, social media, transparency, neoliberalism, etc.) of the relationship between the modern-day information environment and (information) society (Han 2015a,b,c).

  13. 13.

    Google Translator. https://translate.google.com/. Accessed: 2016-11-14.

  14. 14.

    Netspeak. http://www.netspeak.org/. Accessed: 2016-11-14.

  15. 15.

    MySQL. https://www.mysql.com/. Accessed: 2016-07-24.

  16. 16.

    Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). https://www.nasa.gov/jpl/deep-web-search-may-help-scientists/. Accessed: 2016-07-24.

  17. 17.

    TCP/IP stands for Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and Internet Protocol (IP). It is possible to envisage TCP/IP as a large software package that is composed of many smaller software programs (protocols). Combined, these individual protocols work together to accomplish the communication in a computer network, for instance, the Internet (Casad 2011, pp. 7–21). The development of TCP/IP is a milestone in the history of computing. Its development is so important that several of the key contributors have been recognized by the ‘ACM A.M. Turing Award’, the highest distinction the computer science community awards.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of International Liberal Studies, Waseda University, 4F, Building 11, 1-6-1 Nishi-Waseda, 169-8050, Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo, Japan

    Alfons Josef Schuster (Assistant Professor in Information Studies)

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  1. Alfons Josef Schuster
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Correspondence to Alfons Josef Schuster .

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  1. School of International Liberal Studies, Waseda University, Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo, Japan

    Alfons Josef Schuster

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Schuster, A.J. (2017). From the Tannhäuser Gate to z8_GND_5296: A Day Trip on the Life-Cycle of Information. In: Schuster, A. (eds) Understanding Information. Advanced Information and Knowledge Processing. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-59090-5_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-59090-5_1

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