Information
The technology of computers is dependent, at its core, on the translation of information in varied formats-- language, decimal numbers, sound waves-- into one format: binary numbers 1 and 0. Computer science, and its associated imagery, tends to conceive and represent information as precisely these 1s and 0s-- a hidden true nature of information; in the case of Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, also a hidden sexual nature of information-as-all, 1 the male and 0 the female. Information is the code itself, and the sexual act promulgates us as information.
Information is often expressed in language as a fluid substance in a container. Letters contain information. Information flows from this page to your mind. Information is thick.
Information is then both the medium and the message, container and contained.
I find it very difficult to think away from this context to what information is. Perhaps a better question is how information works. (An answer you have performed in reading this text-- but which still left you without the information to answer it.)
Perhaps information can be touched only in the liminal act of its transmission-- its translation?
"During the past decade mathematicians have discovered with surprise and pleasure that information can be subjected to scientific treatment. Indeed, it meets one of the strictest requirements: it can be measured precisely. Information has been found to have as definite a meaning as a thermodynamic function, the nonpareil of all scientific quantities. It has properties like entropy. Recently the mathematical physicist L. N. Brillouin has shown that information is, in fact, negative entropy. For the moment, however, we shall merely state that information is something contained in a message which may consist of discrete digits and letters or of a varying but continuous signal. Signals convey information only when they consist of a sequence of symbols or values that change in a way not predictable by the receiver." - Gilbert W. King, Scientific American, Sept 1952
See also Katherine Hayles' "How We became Posthuman: virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature, and informatics" (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), for a more detailed account of the discursive overlaps between information and literature. Through a series of examples ranging from Norbert Weiner to William Burroughs, Hayles addresses the tendency within writings about information to conceive of the message that is transmitted as potentially free of its transmitting medium. In opposition to this crypto-idealism, Hayles insists on the necessary intersection between form and content: the in-forming of matter with pattern. The information is the composite bond of both the form and the matter that bears the form.
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