I am becoming more and more interested in knowledge management. It is a topic, like information science, whose depth can be perceived only after an introduction to the subject.
All the information is used through an “action” to produce information to the same form (for example, I copy a file) or in a different form (I craft a washing machine or a book about philosophy)
So we have to start with the action in mind. Problem: we do not always know the final action we want to achieve (that happens most of the times). Problem II: how we define an “action”? For example, producing a written business plan is by itself an action, or it is just storing information on a medium?
There is also the concept of “distance”.
All the information use a medium to be stored and transferred. Such medium can also be our brain or our neurosystem – for things such as sports or capabilities.
So one must account for:
- the transferability of the medium;
- the time of usage.
Actor is a entity (for example, a person) that takes a piece of information and “act” to transform it into something different in the real world.
Funny thing, in the last years humans have started to become less and less the final “actors” of the information. Now a lot of information is designed specifically for machines.
There is almost never a relation one-to-one between one piece of information and the resulting action. That aspect extends the research field into the “mysterious” worlds of the accessibility, information overload, remixing, etc. etc.