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A short, informal account of our ever-increasing dependence on a complex multiplicity of messages, records, documents, and data. We live in an information society, or so we are often told. But what does that mean? This volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series offers a concise, informal account of the ways in which information and society are related and of our ever-increasing dependence on a complex multiplicity of messages, records, documents, and data. Using information in its everyday, nonspecialized sense, Michael Buckland explores the influence of information on what we know, the role of communication and recorded information in our daily lives, and the difficulty (or ease) of finding information. He shows that all this involves human perception, social behavior, changing technologies, and issues of trust. Buckland argues that every society is an “information society”; a “non-information society” would be a contradiction in terms. But the shift from oral and gestural communication to documents, and the wider use of documents facilitated by new technologies, have made our society particularly information intensive. Buckland describes the rising flood of data, documents, and records, outlines the dramatic long-term growth of documents, and traces the rise of techniques to cope with them. He examines the physical manifestation of information as documents, the emergence of data sets, and how documents and data are discovered and used. He explores what individuals and societies do with information; offers a basic summary of how collected documents are arranged and described; considers the nature of naming; explains the uses of metadata; and evaluates selection methods, considering relevance, recall, and precision.
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INFORMATION AND SOCIETY A The MIT Press Essential Knowledge Series Auctions, Timothy P. Hubbard and Harry J. Paarsch Understanding Beliefs, Nils J. Nilsson Cloud Computing, Nayan Ruparelia Computing: A Concise History, Paul E. Ceruzzi The Conscious Mind, Zoltan L. Torey Crowdsourcing, Daren C. Brabham Free Will, Mark Balaguer Information and Society, Michael Buckland Information and the Modern Corporation, James W. Cortada Intellectual Property Strategy, John Palfrey The Internet of Things, Samuel Greengard Memes in Digital Culture, Limor Shifman Metadata, Jeffrey Pomerantz The Mind–Body Problem, Jonathan Westphal MOOCs, Jonathan Haber Neuroplasticity, Moheb Costandi Open Access, Peter Suber Paradox, Margaret Cuonzo Self-Tracking, Gina Neff and Dawn Nafus Robots, John Jordan Waves, Frederic Raichlen INFORMATION AND SOCIETY MICHAEL BUCKLAND The MIT Press | Cambridge, Massachusetts | London, England © 2017 Massachusetts Institute of Technology All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. This book was set in Chaparral Pro by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited. Printed and bound in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available. ISBN: 978-0-262-53338-6 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 CONTENTS Series Foreword vii Foreword by David Bawden Preface xiii 1 Introduction ix 1 Information – My passport – The division of labor and the need to know – Agendas of others – Information society – Truth, trust, and belief – The structure of this book 2 Document and Evidence 21 Information as thing – Documents and document anatomy – The history of information technology – The rise of data sets – Some practical initiatives – Problems of later use – Bibliography reconsidered – World brain and other