International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics

According to A. ZELEZNIKAR: "Today's meaning of information concerns communication or reception of knowledge, or intelligence. But information is also knowledge obtained from investigation, study or instruction, as well as data and facts.

"At least, it is becoming clear (that)…the contemporary meaning of information is developing as form and process in the entire phenomenology and how this meaning will still come into existence during new investigations" (1988, p.187).

One of the main features of information as we understand it nowadays is that the same observed form may imply different meanings for different observers, but also that different information may lead to the same understanding to one observer, or to various ones.

Some meanings given to "information" nowadays seem over-extended.

Has for example the so-called genetic "code" an information content? Does it transmit "information", or "data" to the cells? Or is it information only for the micro-biologist and the physician?

Another difficulty surges from a frequent confusion between information and communication. Many times CI. SHANNON and W. WEAVER's "Theory of communication" is referred to as "Theory of information ", while these authors limit themselves to a study of a channel's quantitative capacity to transmit data, the needed (quantitative) redundancy to compensate noise, and the number of bits needed to discriminate elements of information. There is nothing therein about meanings in a semiologic or semantic sense.

G.R. JOHNSON denounces some abusive uses of "information" in social sciences: "Social scientists are usually interested in the content of a communication, not just in the number of bits that it takes to encode (it)… (Most of them) use the term "information" to mean something roughly equivalent to "ideas, beliefs, attitudes, values, and other nonmaterial stuff". Unfortunately, they often seem to confuse the two different uses of this single term. Impressed by the rigorous measurement of "information" as defined by communications engineers and computer scientists, a great many social scientists have deceived themselves into thinking that their own imprecise, ordinary language concept of "information" has been given scientific legitimacy. It has not…" (1992, p.1147).

(See ZELEZNIKAR's essay for many stimulating insights on information and its actual derivations as for example: "informative", "informatics", "informatizable", "informatization", "informational processes" and the relations of these concepts with neurology, brain, behavior and the observer's problem).