Blockchain Bachelor’s Thesis – Information Overload and Methods of its Elimination in the Modern Information Society: Definitions of Terms and Premises - Information

Source

Previously published

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Introduction

Blockchainized Bachelor’s Thesis
Blockchainized Bachelor’s Thesis – Initial Brainstorm

Thesis

1.Abstract
2.Preface
3.Introduction
4.Definitions of terms and premises
4.1.Information

Sources

1.Battling Information Overload in the Information Age
2.1.The knowledge-attention-gap: Do we underestimate the problem of information overload in knowledge management? pt.1
2.2.The knowledge-attention-gap: Do we underestimate the problem of information overload in knowledge management? pt. 2
3.Database Research faces the Information Explosion
4.The experience of mobile information overload: struggling between needs and constraints
5.Longer online reviews are not necessarily better
6.An ant-colony based approach for real-time implicit collaborative information seeking
7.A psychological framework to enable effective cognitive processing in the design of emergency management information systems

Case study: Interview

1. First draft

4 Definitions of terms and premises

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In information science there practically are very few consensus based definitions. This is of course due to the age of the whole scientific field and the time that the information scientists had to look for truths. In connection with this work, this means the following. It is essential to fully comprehend my understanding of individual terms, because they will be widely used throughout the work. This should prevent potential information noise.

4.1 Information

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Information is the most important and at the same time the most difficult definition that needs to be introduced for the needs of this work. Just like Floridi, I support the information ontology, according to which information is one of the essential building materials of the universe [3]. This idea is directly linked to Wheeler's thesis "Before there was a Bit". This does not imply that the universe is some kind of digital computer, but only that information as a physical entity is at the exact level of importance as matter and energy itself in the formation of objective reality [4]. It is therefore a kind of information network, a seemingly endless spectrum of ones and zeros. Information is a holistic phenomenon and process in it. It existed before the birth of the earth and man and it will exist after it [6].

People, of course, are part of this objective reality too. We are not an exception. The discovery of genetic code and the subsequent development of molecular biology has led to the idea that information is a basic biological feature and that the transmission of information is perhaps as fundamental part, if not more fundamental, of living organisms than metabolism, reproduction and other manifestations of life [4]. Our genetic code is also a sort of bundle of information - so at the birth of a human being there was also information and still is there during its life. Dawkins skilfully describes the situation. Gene, or genetic information, has one goal - to survive. A similar network of information as in the universe, though in a much smaller edition, is also a human being (who would never have existed without the information that helped to create it). The human being is therefore just a vehicle for that genetic information. It only can survive by reproduction and will do all that is in its power to achieve it [5]. Thanks to evolution, the human race's brain has greatly improved in time. It allowed us to logically think and to perceive the very objective reality (the information network) through it. It is therefore highly probable that the endocept (see subchapter Thinking) is largely influenced if not completely predetermined by genetic information. Deeper into biological theories, however, I will not run. The biological theory of information, from my point view, also confirms Floridi's description of the human being as an information organism, or inforg. These are, thanks to the brain, capable of gaining ever greater knowledge of the above-mentioned reality [3].

Floridi offers a universal general definition of information. It claims that "information is properly created, meaningful and true data". Data is understood to be a kind of absence of uniformity, or monotony. According to him, the information is a set of data that, in order to be considered as information, must be created in accordance to the syntactical rules, meaningfully and truthfully [3].

Michael Buckland also distinguishes three kinds of information.

1. Information as a thing, which is information related to a document.
2. Information as a process, which is information that changes a person's state of knowledge.
3. Information as knowledge, which information about knowledge.
   Information as a thing relates to physical and objective information and is essentially equivalent to it. In the other two meanings, information is something abstract and intangible. Buckland argues in favour of considering information as a thing, since it is directly relevant to information science because the information sciences are primarily concerned with information in the form of documents [4].

The following is relevant to this work. Information is the basic building block of a physical domain. It forms the universe, including human beings. Through its senses, and through the neurons in the brain, they are able to decrypt the reality by receiving the information that creates it and subsequently store it, but unlike material products, information is not consumed in the process, even if it is used by more people at a time. The way it (the human being, respectively the senses and the brain) is managing this tackles the work below.

Sources

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3.FLORIDI, Luciano. The Philosophy of Information. 1. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. ISBN 978-0-19-923238-3.
4.BOWDEN, David a Lyn ROBINSONOVÁ. Úvod do Informační vědy. Brno: Flow, 2017. ISBN 978-80-88123-10-1.
5.DAWKINS, Richard. Sobecký gen. Praha: Mladá fronta, 1998. Kolumbus. ISBN 80-204-0730-8.
6.CEJPEK, Jiří. Informace, komunikace, myšlení: Úvod do informační vědy. 1. vyd. Praha : Karolinum, 1998. 179 s. ISBN 80-7184-767- 4.