Date
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Keynote at Phenomenology of Information conference organised by the Jagellonian University Institute of Information Studies, Polish Phenomenological Association, and Jagellonian University Museum Collegium Maius.
Abstract
Information science has begun to take more-than-human information practices seriously, largely through relational ontologies imported from science and technology studies. That vocabulary is good at asserting that non-humans participate in informational undertakings, and poor at explaining how anything comes to inform anyone at all. Without such an account, the more-than-human claim risks resting on assertion, and information habitats collapse back into contexts, containers within which informing happens.
Proceeding from the notions of making and taking information and situational appropriation, I discuss in this talk how UexkĂĽll's notion of Umwelt, Merleau-Ponty's habit and Husserl's Auffassung als can productively nuance the understanding of both the information habitat where information practices in general and making and taking information in particular take place, and how it happens in practice. My suggestion is that context is an unproductive abstraction. It names as a container what is in fact constituted in the same movement as the informing it is supposed to explain. Informativeness cannot be secured in advance by whoever makes a record, and habitats cannot be described independently of their inhabitants. The argument is developed through examples drawn from empirical work on archaeological information practices and closes by asking what an information infrastructure would look like if it were designed for habitats rather than for transmission.
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