A proto-paradigm for information science research

Introduction

Information science got its start in 1968, when the professional association, the American Documentation Institute, changed its name to the American Society for Information Science, and the association’s journal, newly renamed the Journal of the American Society for Information Science (JASIS), published Hal Borko’s definitional article describing the field (Borko, 1968). Three main sub-fields developed within information science: informetrics, information seeking behaviour, and information retrieval.

These three areas were presaged in Borko’s article, where he described the purposes of the field:

Information science is that discipline that investigates the properties and behaviour of information, the forces governing the flow of information, and the means of processing information for optimum accessibility and usability. (Borko, 1968, p. 3)

Informetrics (also known as bibliometrics and scientometrics) studies the patterns to be found in recorded information and develops laws and understanding around the statistical character of information. Information retrieval studies how best to describe, store, organize, and retrieve information from recorded-information stores, and information seeking behaviour studies the flow of information through society and in and among people and individuals. Aspects of the latter are also known as information practice, social informatics, and social epistemology.

These three areas are obviously related to each other and to Borko’s description. Yet they still lack a core unifying research paradigm that would bring them all together in a common body of theory. The three areas have tended to be researched fairly independently ever since the beginning of the field.

I took my first teaching position at the University of Maryland in 1972. If you had asked me at that time whether we as a discipline would have a generally agreed upon paradigm for information science 50 years later in 2022, I would have said, "Of course! Information science is a wonderful, exciting new field. I am sure it will draw in many people to study its questions, and somewhere along the line, someone or some people will have developed a paradigm in the Kuhnian sense for the field."

I could not possibly have imagined what it is actually like now. The Internet simply was not even a possibility in our mental spaces in those days. And while I thought that information would grow in interest in society, and would become more and more important as a research topic, I also could not have imagined how compact digital storage would enable phenomenal, exponential growth in the amount of information stored on the planet. I could not have imagined how our problem today is a surfeit, rather than a scarcity, of information.

But these massive outside influences do not fully explain why we have not come to develop a robust core theoretical paradigm. Järvelin and Vakkari reviewed fifty years of research in LIS, from 1965 to 2015, and concluded:

A field of research may institutionalize both cognitively and socially. ….It is questionable whether the 50 years have led to cognitive institutionalization in LIS as a whole. There hardly exists a shared understanding of principal research problems and goals. (Järvelin & Vakkari, 2022, p. 82)

I would have to agree, though I would use the phrase intellectually institutionalize rather than cognitively institutionalize. I do think that we have institutionalized socially very well, with perhaps some diminution in the last several years. We have a good scientific scholarly culture, with several key journals, conferences, paper reviewing, and awards that are characteristic of scientific specialties. I have treasured that, as I have been able to earn recognition among my colleagues, debate substantive research questions at conferences, and the like. There is, in fact, a "there" there socially as a research specialty, but why have we not produced a paradigm that better organizes our research thinking and debates? Our field remains fragmented into at least the three broad areas mentioned above.

For one thing, our little field of information science was simply pushed aside by the behemoths of computer science and business. People who recognized the incipient power of a world-wide dense information network, and who recognized the multifarious uses of the information produced by the users of the Internet, could care less for the most part about pure research on information seeking and use, or about helping people get, store, and utilize information effectively. Unfortunately, the power of the Internet quickly led to exploitation of information in the crassest possible ways, to the detriment of the users and the spectacular financial betterment of the exploiters of the new information space (Internet companies saw data provided by customers as profit gold, which they would sell again and again to other companies. Libraries viewed circulation data from their users’ book borrowing as private, and operated on the principle that they had an ethical obligation not to reveal it to anyone, short of being subpoenaed).

Information science, as a pure field of study, was pushed to the side and relegated to the supposedly rapidly fading past world of libraries and archives - what do librarians and archivists know about information? What a joke. They were all wrong about us, of course. But the money and the social power of the players in the current information world is so much more vast than our numbers and social influence that, in fact, information science has become a sort of neglected backwater. In society, so much about information, so little about information science.

I retain hope, however that information science may finally be given its due, as a rich, full body of research emerges in this century out of the field as we knew it in the late 20th and early 21st century. Today, I am suggesting a proto-paradigm that could form the basis for that eventual full paradigm.

Information science

I will be arguing that the field of information science should be organized theoretically and practically around, well, information. Information science, despite its name, would not necessarily have to be built on information. Many people in the iSchool community describe their interests as focusing around the intersection of people, information, and technology, for example. However, I want to argue that information should be the central focus, with theoretical and operational linkages building out from there. I am sick to death of hearing that information science is “interdisciplinary.” I reject that term, because something that is interdisciplinary is, well, interdisciplinary. It is not a discipline. It exists between disciplines. I want the field to stand or fall based on whether there is a centre, a “there” there. And I would like that centre to be information. The power of information as a central organizing concept for a discipline has not yet been fully explored or as richly developed as it can be.

Information is also obviously the core concept around which the three areas of information science have developed, as per Borko’s description. What has stopped us is the lack of a common core definition of the term that we can all agree upon.

So, what does a field devoted to the subject matter of information in all its manifestations and uses need from a definition of the term?

• The term, as defined, must be applicable to all reasonable contexts in which the term is needed/used in the field.
• It should be able to form the basis of, or, be useful in, further research and application in the field.

So how would we go about building a paradigm on this basis? Well, first, we would need a definition of the term information. But that does not seem right - defining information is one of the main areas of contestation in this field. If we want to form a paradigm, we cannot cut off that core area of debate and dispute. Well, not necessarily. A paradigm develops a whole conceptualization, a body of theory as the basis for selecting a particular definition of the term. That conceptual framework then becomes an essential part of the paradigm. The definition can and will still be challenged, but on the basis of challenging part or all of the whole paradigm.

I will of course propose my own definitions relating to information, but I believe there are other definitions that could be harmonious with the framework of this paradigm. We will be asking how well a particular definition of the term fits with the overall conceptualization of the paradigm. I will not try to come up with alternative definitions, but I believe they could exist within the proposed framework.

One thing my conceptualization of information does require, however, is that information must be seen to operate in both objective and subjective contexts. My prior papers on this subject were harshly criticized because they dealt with information in both subjective and objective senses. Apparently, only subjective experiences can be informative. (Anyone who posits an objective sense, as I do, is a retrograde nineteenth century positivist whose every idea must be rejected!)

But in fact we deal with information in countless ways and contexts where we can think of it as either subjective or objective or both. Information is in books, on computer servers, in people’s minds, in communications between one person and another, and so on and so on. To meet my first criterion, then, our paradigm must also be able to deal with all the contexts, both subjective and objective, where we want to use the term.

To meet the second criterion, the conceptualization of information presented here will be shown to serve well as the basis for the various topic areas and research concerns of the field as constituted, both now and going forward.

Conceptualization of information

Information is the pattern of organization of matter and energy.

Information does not consist of the matter and energy, but rather is the pattern of organization of matter and energy. At its most fundamental level, information is a single difference - on or off, or one or zero. At more complex levels, information is structure, organization, and, of course, pattern. To say this, however, is not to say that information is identical with the matter and energy; rather it is the pattern of organization of it. As the physicist Norbert Wiener has said: “Information is information, not matter or energy.” (1961, p. 132)

Information exists in nature, without any sensing animal having to be aware of it in order for the information to exist. Somewhere, in a galaxy far, far away, there is a planet covered in rocks. No living thing exists on the planet, and no living thing has witnessed the rocks on the planet. It is still the case that the structure of the rocks interacts with the structure of anything else on the planet, such as water, methane, or other rocks. If there is a rockslide on the planet, it is still the case that the edges and angles of the rocks will slip into whatever openings there are in the planet surface below. If there is an opening ten centimetres wide, a 15 centimetre wide rock will not be able to slide into the opening; it will be blocked by the narrower width. So here natural structure conforms to the realities of other natural structures. The information of the structures of the rocks, both those constituting the ten-cm wide opening and the 15-cm wide rock, conforms to and expresses the physical realities of nature. I think you can call that an objective reality.

In this sense, information is real, it conforms to physical realities; it is not just an invention in the mind of humans. The atmosphere in that faraway planet has a certain composition of atoms, and the rocks below have very different compositions of atoms. Along with those different compositions come different colours, densities, shapes and so on. Real patterns of organization, as manifested in matter and energy, interact with other patterns of organization, and the consequences follow the physical laws of nature.

Thus, information is not dependent on living beings. However, living animals, and to some extent plants, have evolved to take advantage of patterns of organization in nature. Once animals and plants can sense, store, and use information, we enter into a new realm of power for information. To start at a basic level, if a tiny creature can find food in places where light reaches, then it is to the advantage of the creature to be able to sense light. Once that species’ surface happens to mutate to develop a sensitivity to light, then the creature can move toward the light and thus gain sustenance and survive. The noted ethologist, Konrad Lorenz, wrote:

Life is an eminently active enterprise aimed at acquiring both a fund of energy and a stock of knowledge, the possession of one being instrumental to the acquisition of the other (Lorenz 1977, as cited in Kovac 2007, p. 70).

All animals use information to get around safely in the world. For example, because we can see, we do not bump into chairs and tables when we enter a classroom.

As cited in an earlier paper of mine (Bates, 2018), Ladislav Kovac wrote:

There is a universal characteristic of any living system to sense relevant features of its surroundings and to react appropriately upon them in order to preserve its own permanence, its onticity. (Kovac 2000, p. 54).

Hence, life from its very beginning is a cognitive system: the self-copying molecule, pursuing its onticity in the world…is already a subject facing the world as an object. (Kovac 2000, p. 59).

So information is vital to living beings. It makes it possible for living beings to find food, evade predators, find mates and nesting sites, and all the other things that go into living and passing on inheritance (another form of information) to later generations. There is information in the physical organization of animate and inanimate structures, and then there is also information as detected and represented and used by living things.

In fact, information is so crucial to living things that evolution has led to an astounding array of methods of information detection and communication, from the eagle’s eye that can detect a rabbit on the ground two kilometres away to the bat’s echolocation to the eel’s communication through electric discharges.

When information is sensed and utilized by living creatures, it may be selected, detained, shaped, and acted upon in indefinitely many ways. Here is where the subjective comes in. Differences appear from one species to another, and from one individual to another within a species, and within one individual from one time to the next. Humans, of course, have extraordinarily many differences, having complicated perceptual, emotional, and cognitive differences galore. The variety of possibilities here is, for our purposes, infinite.

Information and life

I have developed a vocabulary suitable for use in our field for information among living beings. I will not review it in detail, but here are some of the key terms.

Natural information: All information is natural information in that it exists in the material world of matter and energy (Bates, 2006, 2018). Those rocks on that faraway planet manifest natural information, just as the rocks in a nearby valley do here on earth.

Natural information is converted into represented information when it encounters a nervous system or an extension of a nervous system. (See Bates, 2006, 2018)

Represented information: Natural information that is encoded or embodied. Encoded information is natural information that has symbolic, linguistic, and/or signal-based patterns of organization. Embodied information is the corporeal expression or manifestation of information previously in encoded form.

A spider sitting in the middle of its web feels a tug on the silk of the web when an insect flies into some part of the web. The spider perceives the tug and the direction of the tug and converts it into some sort of signal within its nervous system. That then leads the spider to move toward the insect so it can secure the insect by wrapping it in silk. That signal within the spider’s nervous system is represented information.

Over hundreds of millions of years, animals have developed the ability to convert interactions with natural information into represented information within their own nervous system, and, further, to use that represented information to act in and interact with the rest of life.

In human beings (as in many other animals as well), information is moving in and out of encoding and embodiment all the time. For example, when I stand on a cliff facing the Golden Gate Bridge, I feel myself to be physically right on the cliff, with the scenery visible all around me, no matter what direction I turn to look. I am “in” the world. But, actually, in order to have that conscious embodied experience, billions of cells are sending signals to each other in my brain and all over my body that collectively together create the lived experience of seeing, hearing, smelling my environment. My conscious experience is embodied in my mind and body, but that experience is enabled by encoded nerve signals through many parts of my brain and body that enable me to feel like I am where I am (Bates, 2018).

So there is natural information that may also be represented. Represented information is encoded or embodied. By using the information in our nervous systems, we are able to have experiences, commit actions, and express thought or feeling in what I have called experienced information, enacted information, and expressed information.

All these terms give us a vocabulary to talk about information in both non-living and living contexts that are important for us in information science.

Now let us open this out to see the evolutionary development of information in living things over the history of the earth. In other words, let us provide a still larger context for our paradigm of information science.

In my papers and in the design of Figure 1 (Bates, 2006, 2015), I have used Susantha Goonatilake’s (1991) conception of the development of types of information usage in living systems. He called these genetic information, neural-cultural information, and exosomatic information. Over most of the history of life on earth, information was passed down from one generation to another solely through genetic means, through DNA. But after a time some animals developed enough complexity that they began engaging in neural-cultural transmission of information. The mother tiger teaches the tiger cub how to hunt. The tiger cub has the physical and cognitive capabilities that it needs to hunt, but the mother must model proper hunting so the cub learns to do it itself. The mother tiger takes the cub that last distance where those inherent capabilities are developed and tested until they have matured enough to enable the cub to do its own hunting in the specific environment where the cub lives.

Among humans, we also modelled for our young to pass on information neural-culturally. We did this for tens of thousands of years before we developed language. Then, remarkably, we developed the astounding capability of language to enable us to describe things not physically present. We could talk about the tiger on the other side of the hill. We stored stories in our minds and then told them when we encountered other people. The neural-cultural capacity is very large in human beings, but it is nonetheless limited. Others can learn from a human only in that person’s presence as they recount their knowledge. When the wise old one dies, that knowledge goes away.

At least 40,000 years ago, we learned to depict animals and other things of importance to us on the walls of caves and elsewhere. We went from experiencing the world around us to consciously representing parts of that world on surfaces outside our bodies. This is a remarkable moment of transition and technological advancement for our species. Then, about 5,000 years ago, we developed ways to write down language. These exosomatic records, as Goonatilake called them, could live beyond one person’s life, and the amount of information stored was limited only by our physical capacity to generate the media upon which to record information. Figure 1 displays my conceptualization of types of information (Bates, 2006, 2015).

One can see in Figure 1 (Bates, 2006, 2015) the types of information I described in each of these channels. Genetic in the genetic lineage, experienced, enacted, and expressed information is in the neural-cultural lineage, and embedded and recorded information in the exosomatic lineage. Embedded information is that embedded in nature by the activities of animals or in the objects and artifacts created by human beings, as in the design and working—or knapping, as it is called—of a flint created by our forebears for cleaning animal hides. Recorded information is communicatory or memorial information preserved in a durable medium. I have also suggested a fourth lineage, the Residue Lineage, which contains trace information, that is, information formerly associated with the living, which has been abandoned and is degrading back into nature (Bates, 2006).

All these concepts provide a way to organize our thinking around the kinds of information that exist and that we need to theorize and do research on. We have a concept of information that is suitable to apply throughout living and non-living things in the universe. Because information is so critical to living things, we also have a vocabulary that identifies what is different about information in living things, and have homed in on the crucial idea of representation of information in the nervous systems of animals.

Figure 2 organizes these ideas.

Information is the pattern of organization of matter and energy. All information is natural information, in that it exists in the material world of matter and energy. All the known physical elements can be found in nature. Natural information that is not represented is neither embodied nor encoded. It just is. But with life and the coming of represented information, then the dual possibility is released of having the information encoded or embodied. Along with life comes represented information in all its forms - genetic, neural-cultural, exosomatic, and residue - the first two associated with the living and the latter two being created non-living forms over to the left of the figure.

In recent years, humans have become so clever that they have devised a way of storing information that is based on silicon rather than carbon-electronic information.

I have long been frustrated when people talk about digital information as though it were something utterly different from other information. It is often forgotten that whether I read about the population of Turkey on paper or on a screen, it is still the population of Turkey! It is still the information I have sought and discovered and can now use.

However, there is another sense in which silicon-based information is different from the other types I have discussed. It is powered by electricity, and as long as that electricity flows, it can be seen as artificially living, as having life-like characteristics that we can analyse and use in our thinking. In other words, when we look at all the things created with electronic information, we can do another analysis in parallel to our analysis of the quot;all-elementquot; and carbon worlds.

For example, electronic information also comes in both embodied and encoded forms. The electronic signals that come into our television sets are encoded when they enter the TV, but are soon embodied in the images created on the screen. The screen image is embodied in two rather than three dimensions, but, otherwise, the encoded signals are converted into something that looks like the real world to us humans. In 3-D printers a type of encoded information is also converted into something embodied in the all-element real world. Through all these technologies the information is going in and out of encoded and embodied forms, sometimes multiple times in a single usage.

There is much analysis and description waiting to be done on other kinds of silicon-based information: augmented reality and virtual reality, the Internet of Things, the Metaverse, and so on and on. Analysing and categorizing these various forms of information and their impact on humans is something that should be at the core of the paradigm of information science.

Everywhere we can see a toggling back and forth between encoding and embodiment. Encoded genetic information is the genotype; embodied genetic information is the phenotype, i.e. the living animal. Embodied neural-cultural experienced information is the lived experience, the conscious or semi-conscious awareness of being alive. The encoded neural-cultural experience is all the background knowledge, memories, patterns of practice encoded in various ways into the animal’s nervous system and body. We are not conscious of this background coding and cannot bring it to consciousness.

Likewise, we embody action in enacted information, and encode the capabilities of action in our nervous system, in trained, skilled muscle movements, and in other background encoding. Likewise, the background encoding makes embodied expression possible, i.e., expressed information.

With exosomatic information, we are making something that is in some respects just like non-living natural information. A book just is. However, a book is a form of re-representation also, because the language and thought in the human mind is represented again and recorded for durability. Then something similar happens in reverse, as the human being who can read the book, unlocks the encoding of the print, re-encodes it into its nervous system, and re-embodies it in the mind’s understanding.

Or think of what happens with a recording of a dance concert. The enaction capability of the dancers is embodied in their dancing. Then a film is made of the dance. The film encodes the images, then the playing of the recording in effect re-embodies the images, at least in two dimensions, providing us with an experience of the dance, even though we are not physically present during the actual dance.

Something analogous goes on with embedded information. A modern-day car engine exhibits the cumulation of countless improvements and modifications, each one improving the power and effectiveness of the motor in propelling the vehicle along the road. Similarly, a beautifully crafted surgical instrument, say, a scalpel, is the result of generations of shaping and improving the usability of the instrument to suit the needs at hand. Each of the improvements in our technology is a kind of embedded information, congealing our improved knowledge and manifesting it in a physical form.

Gilbert Simondon, a philosopher of technology, has said:

Culture is unbalanced because it recognizes certain objects, like the aesthetic object, granting them citizenship in the world of significations, while it banishes other objects (in particular technical objects) into a structureless world of things that have no signification but only a use, a utility function. (Simondon, 1958/2017, p. 16)

…[T]he machine is the stranger; it is the stranger inside which something human is locked up, misunderstood, materialized, enslaved [I would say “embedded”] and yet which nevertheless remains human all the same. (1958/2017, p. 16)

Much quintessentially human culture and ingenuity is locked up within objects we have made. And the information - the pattern of organization of matter and energy of those objects - changes and is refined as we create a better and better match between what we need and what nature has afforded us.

Now let us imagine all these kinds of information being converted into electronic information. We upload our film of the dancers, or our printed book to Amazon’s "Look inside" feature, and all this encoded information is stored electronically in the world of silicon. The information is re-re-represented!

What changes when information goes through all these processes? What discipline should have something really important to say about all these transformations? Information science!

One reason electronic information has grown so explosively is that it breaks down all the rich complexity of patterns of organization into the most elementary units possible to go into a pattern of organization - on and off, one and zero. Information can be processed very effectively when reduced to this elementary form.

Here is another fragment running across my mind….

We can describe a "memory pulse", a "storing pulse", and a "network pulse". Looking historically, there was a time when memory was the only way to retain information. Then with exosomatic information a whole new realm of storing was opened up, with recorded information limited only by our ability to create the media on which to store it. With the Internet, of course, we have a network pulse. This is not new, by the way. Networked information in scholarship has existed for centuries in footnote references between books and articles. So there was a network before the net. (See Bates, 2002, for an exploration of these three types of storage for searching theory.)

What do all three of these have in common? Copying, replicating, retention. It was one of Claude Shannon’s many contributions that he showed how redundancy is the only way to insure the transmission of information against error or loss. All three of these, the memory, storing, and network pulses, are forms of redundancy and retention. Though each of these three may have dominated during a particular historical period, it is also the case that all three function still today as powerful ways to retain and preserve information. The basic principle of cryptocurrency is to have so many copies around that no one can get away with altering the information for criminal purposes, because there will always be another correct copy out there somewhere. And of course we have countless other forms of network use, storage use, and memory use. They are all about copying and copying is all about information retention and transmission.

The discussion to this point is, as is appropriate for the title of my talk, all about information and centring information at the heart of our field. However, for those of us who really are most interested in information seeking, behaviour, or practices, whatever it shall be called, what would our intellectual life be like after the introduction of this information-oriented proto-paradigm?

My response is to say, "not to fear". In the end, our interest in information arises from the ways in which information plays a role in human activities and thought. The intersection or interaction of human beings with information is surely a core area of study in the information science paradigm.

In 2005, I wrote about metatheories, theories, and models in information behaviour research in Fisher and Erdelez’s book Theories of Information Behaviour (Bates, 2005). In Thomas Kuhn’s classic formulation (1996), a paradigm includes the metatheory, the theory, the methodology, and the ethos, all combined, of a discipline or specialty (Bates, 2005, p. 2). To give readers a sense of the variety of metatheories that have been utilized in information science, I identified 13 of these "approaches", describing each briefly. They were 1) historical, 2) constructivist, 3) constructionist or discourse-analytic, 4) philosophical-analytic, 5) critical theory, 6) ethnographic, 7) socio-cognitive, 8) cognitive, 9) bibliometric, 10) physical, 11) engineering, 12) user-centred design, and 13) evolutionary. (p. 10-14)

More recently, Jenna Hartel identified seven “turns” that have taken place in information seeking research.

Turns are recognizable intellectual projects in which a band of scholars enthusiastically embrace a new set of theoretical, methodological, or substantive commitments. These alternative visions typically critique the status quo and focus attention on a different research agenda or frontier. (Hartel, 2019, p. 1)

Hartel’s turns were these: 1) cognitive, 2) affective, 3) neo-documentary, 4) socio-cognitive, 5) everyday life, 6) social constructionist, and 7) embodied.

Recently, these various approaches have generated concern in the field, because information seeking research has not settled down into a single or even a handful of common approaches, and instead, it seems that the field is generating ever more approaches to the research, in an ever-expanding circle of metatheories. This plethora of metatheories seems to make our field seem unfocused, and indeed lacking in a coherent paradigm.

I suggest, however, that this variety is not only necessary but suitable for our distinctive field. Information science is not a typical academic field, but rather a meta-discipline. Information science does not fit on the usual spectrum of disciplines, ranging from the arts and humanities at one end through the social sciences to natural sciences and mathematics at the other. There is no logical slot along that spectrum for information science to fit in. See Figure 3.

Instead, we, like education and communication, take the product of all the other disciplines, namely their learning, and shape it for a particular social purpose. Education shapes knowledge for teaching and learning; it develops theories and practices for how best to help the student grasp the content of every subject field. Information science shapes the products of the disciplines through selection, classification, and indexing for storage and retrieval, and communication and journalism shape information for current societal distribution.

At this stage in our understanding, it is not clear what sorts of paradigms and philosophies are suitable for meta-disciplines, in contrast to the conventional disciplines. I propose that we see these numerous approaches as a necessary and appropriate exploration of the complex topic of information and its relation to human beings, not as a disadvantage or failing.

Let us suppose, then, that we base our understanding of the discipline of information science on the approach to information that has been presented here. Then as long as we have the core conceptualization of information in the paradigm presented here, we are free to explore all the approaches that the social sciences have taken to the phenomena of interest in the social sciences. We are not wedded to any one of these approaches, because we are starting with a different kind of discipline in the first place.

Figure 4 is a simplified diagram of the various principal domains where various theoretical and methodological approaches have concentrated their attention in considering the role of information in human life. At the bottom is the self, the thinking, motivated being, which is within the body, existing in a physical ecology, which is highly shaped by all the social and cultural elements of human existence, labelled society.

At the top, representing the more abstract domains of human existence in language and intellectual culture are discourse and documentation. Human discourse is poured into and onto exosomatic information, which then becomes a further part of the discourse. ("Documentation", rather than "exosomatic information" is used here to retain the familiar term used in the field when this research is happening.) At one time or another, all of these domains have been explored in information seeking research. Note that if we were to compare this diagram to comparable ones for other social science fields, the other ones might not have the documentation layer, which is uniquely important to information science.

Drawing from the sets of approaches and turns listed above, and adding a few more, Figure 4 lists the various approaches next to the area emphasized the most in each metatheory. This display is entirely approximate. Arguments could be made for different names of areas, and different main focuses of particular metatheories. My purpose here is to demonstrate the wide range of approaches that have been taken, and the major areas of human life that have been emphasized in the research, not to categorize and classify precisely either the life areas or the metatheories. This diagram is all in service of making the case that information seeking research fits just fine within a model of information science as fundamentally based on—information. These various metatheories and models have been developed in the social sciences and have been the focus of debate and disputation over what constitutes the heart of sociology, psychology, biology, and so on. Within our field, however, we look at each of the areas with the unifying thread of information running through them.

To take just one example from the metatheories to illustrate what I mean: Critical theory in relation to information. Critical theory is engaged in identifying the social structures and power relationships that block or hinder people. It uncovers the racism or sexism or other biasing social structures and relationships present. Clearly, these factors have a huge impact on the movement of information through society, as Elfreda Chatman so sensitively documented. So each of these metatheories brings its perspective to the role of information. Using any one of these metatheories, a researcher can trace the role or impact of information through human life and institutions, from the perspective of that metatheory.

Finally, in reviewing the metatheories of Figure 4, I see no reason to reject any of them, or to argue that there is some other one preferable way to look at these metatheories. Instead, I suggest that the unique core of our field is information; it is that red thread that goes through all animal lives, and especially human lives. The study of information is what uniquely defines our field. That this utterly fundamental phenomenon could be studied from many directions and perspectives should not be surprising.

Conclusions

So how has my approach to information met the two criteria I gave at the beginning for a definition of information? That it must be usable in all the contexts where the field studies and utilizes the concept, and it should be able to form the basis for further research development in the field.

Information as the "pattern of organization of matter and energy" is frequently criticized because it sounds so broad. Well, if a wink, or a scent, or a 100-page philosophical disquisition can all be information, then we must have a definition broad enough to encompass all those circumstances.

Then, next, is it suitable as a definition to form the basis of further research in the field? I will not pause to make an argument for it, but I believe that the traditional information science areas of informetrics and information retrieval are well-supported by my core definition of information. This understanding of information, as I have argued, is ultimately continuous with Shannon’s binary, on/off concept of information. Any computer science oriented information scientist should ultimately favour such an approach. As regards the third area, information seeking, the prior section made the argument of the applicability of this information focus to research in that area.

Further, I have gone part way in the paradigm development process by providing a number of ancillary concepts useful for discussion—encoded/embodied, natural/represented; carbon-based and silicon-based information. I have incorporated Goonitilake’s three channels of information transfer through the history of life on earth, and have added one of my own. I have defined numerous types of information. I have claimed the universality of the memory pulse, the storing pulse, and the network pulse. I have argued for a better worked-though taxonomy of channels and forms of information objects, and for the development of a sophisticated model of the various ways that information is altered as it moves through various forms of encoding and embodiment.

I have made an argument for why it is suitable and appropriate for information science to explore applying numerous social science paradigms to the phenomenon of information. I have argued that information science is a meta-discipline, not one of the conventional range of academic disciplines. Therefore, it is at least worthwhile to experiment with applying those various conceptual models to research on information as distinct from research on the traditional content of those other academic disciplines.

Could we not work off of these elements of information science theory, and finally integrate them together into a true disciplinary - not interdisciplinary - a true disciplinary paradigm for the field?

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