When Is Information?

• In Event: The Temporal Repertoire

Abstract

Much ink has been spilled by theorists and scientists of information regarding the 'what-ness' of their namesake. In a diverse body of recent literature, spanning informatics, archival studies, and infrastructure studies, there has been a veritable pivot away from rigid, finite, and stable ontologies of information, towards all things relational, embodied, and processual. However much of this scholarship positing an inherent relationality of information, while important in its own right, seemingly depends upon a tacit anthropocentrism. In this paper, I will argue that this fraught centering of the human, which ultimately has the effect of reifying some of the latent assumptions it ostensibly set out to dispel, might be resolved by denaturalizing the metaphors of spatiality which implicitly temper our understanding of relationality. Instead, I will take first steps towards a theoretical framework in which temporality as such can be deployed as a more dependable axis upon which this relational turn in information studies might revolve. In order to convincingly make this case, I will develop my argument in three steps: first, by clearly articulating the idiosyncratic philosophy of time developed by Gilles Deleuze; second, by rereading two case studies of information scholarship according to this temporal rubric, including Briet’s famous antelope and a more contemporary example of datafication; and finally, by offering a two-pronged terminological intervention adopted from Baruch Spinoza’s 17th-century philosophy of nature. Altogether, I hope to reroute the perennial question of what information is, through a more vibrant and generative terrain: when is information?

Author

• Brian Justie, Department of Information Studies, UCLA