Spink: Information - cognitive change in meaning

We associate technology with information, but from an information behaviourist perspective, information is that what changes people's cognitive state. So information is not something that can be stored, that's data. Information is something that actually causes, that relates to cognitive change in people's understanding or meaning. You can't really have information without meaning. So I think that's much more of a psychological, behavioural view of information. While I think we tend to be dominated by the technology view. The hard sciences’ view of information which for humans is not very helpful. It's helpful for data communications people, but it's not very helpful for ordinary people. I think one of the problems is that we're not really helping ordinary people understand their day-to-day behaviours. That is one of the great things about psychology, that psychologists popularised terms, so people now talk about extraversion and intraversion, they talk about... Like if you ask someone to diagnose their own personality, they can probably do it, because they have that understanding that psychology has given them. Whereas information behaviour has not yet given people the tools to understand and describe their own behaviours. So I think this is a challenge we're only just starting to realize.