The Nature of Information – A Workshop Report
This opportunity to meet with information professionals discussing future fields of information development took place in lovely and appropriate surroundings.
The 8th Social Study of ICT workshop (SSIT8) at LSE on 25th April was a well-attended event that concentrated on the problems of the relationships of information to data, and the real-world treatment of the mass of information and data which both information professionals and companies are expected to deal with on a daily (if not moment-to-moment) basis.
After an inspirational keynote speech by Albert Borgmann, the events that followed were a pattern of talks and panel sessions where all speakers were able to offer new facets on our interpretations of the ‘Organizational Consequences of Information Growth’ (Panel 1) and ‘Information, Memory and Culture’ (Panel 2). The latter was a lively and comprehensive conclusion to the day.
Definitive highlights were John Gantz’s informative and descriptive report on ‘The Expanding Information Universe’ – a report which should be read by anyone intent on proving to their CEO that email storage space isn’t quite as simple as we can believe – the concept of calculating the impact of an email should have prompted everyone to reconsider their email strategy.
Lev Manovich’s impressive presentation on visual digital culture described another facet of information whilst impressing upon us the potential of a graphically evaluated technological culture, the benefits, and the rich potential of such evaluation.
Other notable points were the well-reasoned panel presentations of Mireille Hildebrandt on data mining in the terms of the law, and Jannis Kallinikos’ part-allegorical and meta-hypertextual exploration of ‘Living in Ephemeria’.
It is to be hoped that by the amount of serious networking during the conference there is a follow-up to this event next year, that is assuming our capacity for information hasn’t exceeded our memory of how vital a resource information is to our fellow professionals.
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