Information as discursive construct

Abstract

By revisiting the notion of "information-as-thing" (Buckland, 1991) and investigating the notion of "regimes of information" (Ekbia and Evans, 2009), this paper shows that "information" is constituted by community consensus and is influenced by economic and political structures of social systems. As such, "information" should be understood as discursive construct. Understanding "information" as discursive construct not only rids us of distorted views of communication and cognition implicated in influential conceptions of information, but also opens up questions concerning "information" for critical social analyses, which in turn leads to epistemological and methodological discussions.