FORMING INFORMATION The Materiality of Recorded Information

FORMING INFORMATIONThe Materiality of Recorded Information

Filbert – Informing Information 2

Nathan W. Filbert

Emporia State University

LI 839 – Professor Ann O’Neill


Abstract

Utilizing concepts such as entanglement, improvisation and

stigmergy from the fields of archaeology, anthropology and other

sciences, this paper will examine recorded information as an

artifact constructed by humans interacting with one another and

with the material resources available to them. Large-scale

processes occurring in complex dynamic open systems provide a

framework for understanding human developments and artifacts,

including culture, language, communication and technologies.

Recorded information exemplifies artifacts stigmergically

constructed through technological improvisations resulting from

human entanglement with material resources. Keywords: information,

culture, recorded knowledge, anthropology, artifacts, material resources, library

science, material culture


“in the exchange of the word we cannot see where the exchange ofthe thing is”

-Michel Serres-

In fact, we are rarely aware of the “thing” at all. The

material resources that comprise a word, a sign, a mark -

inscribed or otherwise made to appear (the sounds of our bodies

with air; tool-drawn with some chemical mix on reed or paper;

scratched, scraped or impressed on clay or stone; coded into

numeric values signaling circuits of energy or pixels; even a

finger in dirt or sand) - often function for us like window-

panes – invisibly framing the information we perceive. Yet these

human-thing material entanglements bring information to life.

And life is a creative composition of matter and energy

interacting in motion. For humans, a “thing” is perceived as a

“transient bounded entity through which matter, energy and

information flow” (Hodder, 2012, p. 219) – a temporarily

perceivable, tangled gathering of living components.

Entanglement and Emergence.

Our world is constituted by the interaction of things.

Things we influence and affect and are affected and influenced


by. The ways humans interact with their material environments

(including one another) is “technology” (Sigaut, 1994) and

produces more things, known as “artifacts” (Aunger, 2010a, p.

764; Hodder, 2012, p. 5). Developing particular “habits and

capabilities” through human group interaction comprise our

“cultures” (Urban, 2010, p. 122). Activities such as increasing

control of vocal impulses for signaling, leaving traces or paths

in our environments, and elaborating means and modes of

communication - from gestures and sounds toward signs and

symbols - are prime examples of socially constituted things, or

“social facts” (Sigaut, 1994, p. 422). Social facts indicate

elements of life selected and composed for the successful

interaction of groups of living things and the promotion of

survival. We often think of such elements as existing-in-

themselves when actually they only exist-in-relations between

humans and things, or humans and humans (things) - including such

realities as language, technology, communication, and behavior,

thought, emotion, and activity.

In order to perceive and examine our world, we differentiate

and distinguish the tangle and chaos of permeable interactions


into transiently bounded gatherings or examinable, identifiable

patterns, thereby co-constructing new things – artifacts. As we

work with, elaborate, and complicate the artifacts (an additive

process) we develop techniques – “any set of movements or acts,

usually and mostly manual, organized and traditional, combined to

achieve a known physical, chemical or organic goal” (Mauss &

Schlanger, 2006, p. 73) resulting in a process and production we

call technology. “Artefacts are the result of particular kinds

of interactions between an organism and materials which those

organisms find useful…Technology is about interaction with

artifacts in particular contexts of engagement” (Aunger, 2010a,

p. 764).

This process can be described as stigmergic – “coordination

mediated by modifications of the environment” (Marsh, 2007, p.

1), which is characteristic of cultures (habits and capabilities)

of social organisms (from insects to humans, see Theraulaz G.,

1999) as they coordinate tasks and behaviors in a shared

environment through “ongoing and mutual modification or

conditioning” (Marsh, 2007, p. 3). This reciprocal coordination

among social groups depends on self-organizing organisms adapting


in open, dynamic, and complex systems resulting in emergent

modifications to behaviors and activities. “The use of

environmental conditions as instigators of action and the overall

ability of the group to perform problem-solving activities that

exceed the knowledge and the computational scope of each

individual member” (Clark, 1997, p. 234) also exhibits a

discernible pattern – “preparation – production – interaction –

maintenance/repair/change – emergence/increased complexity

(“fix”) or abandonment/disposal” (Aunger, 2010b; Hodder, 2011;

Ingold, 2011; Sigaut, 1994).

Improvisation.

As social coordination forms, interactively utilizing

environmental resources, co-developing habits and capabilities in

relation to one another, things, and thing-to-thing, new

environments emerge which include these techniques, technologies,

signals, practices, processes and shared artifacts. This

promotes continual adaptation and accretion – the constant

presence of change. The co-construction of environments - of


organisms with material resources, facilitating changes and

further co-construction - is improvisation.

There is no script for social and cultural life. People have to work it out as they go along. In a word, they have to improvise. [Improvisation]…is generative, in the sense that it gives rise to the phenomenal forms of culture as experienced by those wholive by them or in accord with them…it is relational, in that it is continually attuned and responsive to the performance of others…it is temporal, meaning that it cannot be collapsed into an instant, or even a series of instants, but embodies certain durations. Finally, improvisation is the way we work (Hallam & Ingold, 2007,p. 1)

In fact, all living things work this way, including

their techniques and artifacts. A spider builds a web by

interacting with its environment’s material resources, but

the artifact (in this case, a web), carries on improvising

via environmental forces of change (weather, decay,

intruder) to be further interacted with by the spider or

abandoned to its own improvisatory processes. Greg Urban

examines a collective of primates that demonstrate

particular howls variously indicating predator-presence

(fear) or interest and desire. Put into a situation that

stimulates both fear and desire, the ape will modify a yowl


as a new sound, combining aspects of the intonations for

fear and desire (Urban, 2002). These improvisational

processes - the reciprocal and reflexive interaction of

organisms and environment, the continual disturbance and

adaptation to change, the ongoing influence of movement in

reorganizing boundaries of matter, energy and information

according to emerging and selected social processes of

coordination - provide a way to engage the materiality of

language in artifacts of text.

Technology.

Technologies are the “way people do things” (White &

Lynn, 1940, p. 142) and a part of the context in which they

do them. The material resources humans utilize in becoming

themselves also act – in the form of constraints and

potentials – continually altering both the humans and their

surround. “In many cases it is not the mind that imposes

its forms on material objects, but rather the latter that

give shape to the forms of thought in this endless shuttling back

and forth between the mind and the material world” (Ingold, 2010, p.


95, italics added). “Technology, then, can be seen as a

paradox – both an effect of societal change and a cause of a

transformed conception both of society and of self” (Budd,

2012, p. 359). The “way people do things” in recording and

encoding marks in materials, result in objects (entities

that are part of the world yet can be treated as separate

from ourselves); activities (skills, behaviors, uses and

forces); knowledge (content acquisition and know-how,

rhetoric and semantic); and purposes (creative, intentional

and as means of control) that are coordinately structured,

shaped and enabled by the material resources and reciprocal

improvisation and innovation.

“New technologies alter the structure of our interests:

the things we think about. They alter the character of our

symbols: the things we think with. And they alter the

nature of community: the arena in which thoughts develop”

(Postman, 1992, p. 20). Recorded information is a realm of

human experience that depends on material resources and both

transmits and modifies culture. “Utterances and discourses

are themselves material objects made through human activity


– made, in a physical sense, out of vibrating columns of

air, ink on paper, pixels in electronic media” (Urban, 2010,

p. 123). Inertia and recursive properties of human learning

produce artifacts that enable complex relationships to the

past. “Metaculture” (or, “culture that is about culture”

Urban, 2010, p. 123) also stigmergically shapes human groups

and their activities and artefacts as cultural groups share

and borrow symbols and words, techniques and technologies to

produce and reorganize information. Interest – “what

counts” for each individual/group/environment mesh – also

has obvious effect on what is inscribed, preserved, utilized

or abandoned. Finally, entropy – noise, disturbances,

forgetting and decay – are forces of change that co-

constitute human-material entanglements.

Taking these larger processes into account, we are able

to make comprehensive inquiries into the significances of

recorded information. We can work to identify and describe

the operations involved in human groups to produce

information artifacts. We can look for paths that specific

environmental affordances and constraints (natural


resources, weather, proximities, etc.) coupled with the

habits and capabilities of human groups (labor needs, size,

threats, values, etc.) interweave - to force, allow or

disable certain technological processes involved in

inscription. We perceive networks of these pathways between

human groups, their environments and resources, and how and

what they select to record.


Textual Artifacts.

“words are artifact types” (Urban, 2010, p. 133)

Theorizing and investigating the origins of language

and its subsequent artifactual developments into forms and

systems of writing have occupied humans for thousands of

years (Goody, 1968, 1977, 2000; Havelock, 1986; Hutchins,

1995; Maturana, 1992; Ong, 1982, 1986; Rossi-Landi &

Williams, 1981; Säljö, 1988; Wright, 2007). Conceptualizing

humanity’s written record within a larger model of

organisms-interacting-with-their- environment enables us to

understand the multitude of arguments and interpretations

associated with the significance of the processes and

products of writing.

Discussions around literacy and cognition; alphabetic

systems in relation to pictographic, logographic and

syllabary systems; even historical and cultural distinctions

made between “primitive” and “advanced” cultures on the

basis of systems of writing, gain important new perspective

when viewed through larger processes. What is difficult


about investigating the significances of humanity’s vast

variety and accumulation of recorded information is that the

processes and products (culture, technology, communication,

social semantics, skills and so on) that comprise the

affordances of recording and inscribing are the very same

processes and products we must use to investigate them.

Viewed from the perspective of organism-environment

interaction and co-constitutive, improvisatory survival

processes, we are able to understand how the inscribed

record necessarily entangles social, political, cultural,

religious, economic, cognitive, behavioral – all manner of

human meanings – both external and internal, global and

local – and is able to traverse various scales of time and

space – owing to its materiality. This perspective sheds

light on arguments relating to whether language developed

primarily for purposes of communication or accounting – as

we are able to follow aspects and developments of complexity

and use through dynamic human-material entanglement and

begin to observe the data with greater flexibility.


“Essentially, language expresses the meanings that

inhere in and define the culture – the information that

constitutes the social system,” serving “both as a vehicle

and as a metaphor – both maintaining and symbolizing the

social system” (Royce & Bowcher, 2007, p. 1). “Writing

connects human artifacts to social practices in which the

artifact plays a functioning role” (Royce & Bowcher, 2007,

p. 112). Though the technologies are unique, and the kinds

of meanings afforded particular, these refractive

“systematic human attempts to make the world intelligible

and to manipulate it in the service of needs experienced”

(Säljö, 1988, p. 1) can be investigated more clearly when a

conception of human-thing entanglement and effects of

dynamic complex systems (stigmergy, emergence) are the

model.

Within this framework, textual developments of

abstraction – logic, numerals, mnemonics, precision,

standardization, generalities, evidence, ‘objectivity’;

organization – codification and classification, hierarchies

and hermeneutics, histories, laws and rituals, in particular


discourses; communication – depersonalization, autonomy,

ideologies, contents and contexts, forms and genres,

education, and so forth, are more fruitfully engaged and

evinced by understanding the active mutual shaping between

humans and their materials. Developments and adaptations,

complexities and simplifications are not owned by human

agents but are describable as constraints and potentialities

co-created between human groups and their material

surroundings.

If, for example, gesture and gestural sounds arose to

enable humans to continue crucial tasks for survival

(Shennan, 2009; Urban, 1998, 2002), we can begin to see how

the improvisatory interplay between material resources and

human groups progress via artifact production and

experience-based learning. Increasingly complex structures

emerge from simple, local rules of interaction through the

recursive social work of maintenance and improvisation.

Modifying use in adapting to change and ever-increasing

complexity as the technologies accrete, results in habits

and capabilities that are “robust, scalable and adaptive”


(Aunger, 2010a, 2010b; Hutchins, 1995; Parunak, 2006).

Interactive, environmental demands and opportunities help to

make sense of pathways of markings – tokens, signals,

pictographs, logograms, cuneiform, syllabaries, notations

and alphabets. For example,

The layout of cases on early tablets was not fixed, andthe signs, while more or less conventionalized in form,displayed considerable variation. The primary referents of the signs are physical objects. The line drawing of a bull’s head refers to a bull or, perhaps, generally to cattle. The general form of the sign is significant, but the composition of the line drawing isnot standardized. It is still the pictorial value thatcounts. But the more the scribes write the more they develop routines to produce the pictograms and in the process turn to impressinginstead of scratching lines into the clay. Drawn lines are replaced by stylus impressions resulting in the characteristic wedge shapes that gave the Sumerian script its modern name: cuneiform, from Latin cuneus ‘wedge’…Recognition of the signs is no longer based on similarity but on discrimination, as pictorial likeness is gradually replaced by the necessity to distinguish one sign from another.Differentiation thus becomes the principal feature of the signs. For example, that the sign of a bull resembles a bull is now less important than that it differs from the sign of a cow. Hence the number and direction of wedges of which a given sign is composed are standardized. Signs come to be characterized as configurations of fixed numbers of strokes arranged in a fixed order…The relationship between signs and objects is superseded by multiple relationships between signs and other signs as the scribes’chief concern. The signs thus become part of a graphicsystem characterized by negative differentiation (Royce& Bowcher, 2007, p. 9, italics added)


and,

When I speak of writing as a technology of the intellect, I refer not just to pen and paper, stylus and tablet, as complex as these instruments are, but tothe training required, the acquisition of new motor skills, and the different uses of eyesight, as well as to the products themselves, the books that are stacked on library shelves, objects that one consults and from which one learns, and which one may also, in time, compose (Goody, 2000, p. 133)

The knowledge, artifacts, intentions and activities

facilitating recorded information throughout its relatively

brief history affect everything about our being-in-the-world

because - like everything else – they involve everything

about our being-in-the-world. They are products and

processes of our “particular kinds of interactions” with

“particular kinds of materials” (Aunger, 2010a, p. 764).

Differences throughout times and cultures “are thoroughly

dependent on technologies, social organizations and cultural

traditions which cannot be understood as simple effects of

the use of different media” (Linell, 2010, p. 41) and are

mutually informed by those material media. The

technologies, social organizations and cultural traditions –


the ways people do things – depend as much on the things

they do with.

Air as a medium for gesture and sound enables

particular communicative movements for our bodies. Stone

allows certain types of marks or alterations calling for

certain kinds of tools. Clay enables another set of

possibilities, depending on availabilities. Papyrus and wood

– cultivation. Wax, papers, ink, the list goes on. Each

material or combination of materials enables and constrains

human action; refuting or allowing reorganization,

reformation, new constructions, tools, methods and types of

information. Humans depend on things and those things

depend on humans, in an ongoing, reciprocal, and improvising

creativity subservient to even larger processes of matter,

energy and movement – all of which inform recorded

information.

Textility

Which brings us to the text – “the wording of anything

written or printed; the structure formed by the words in


their order; the very words, phrases, and sentences as

written” (“text, n.1,” n.d.). “Texture, tissue…the process

or art of weaving…to construct by or as by weaving; to give

a texture to anything” (“text, n.2,” n.d., “text, v.,” n.d.,

“texture, n.,” n.d.). We have already seen how structure,

visibility, transferability, organization, content, and

textual kind or style, size or type depend on the material

in which it is embodied and the tools, techniques and

technologies required to produce them. How appropriate that

we call the artifacts text – as they give texture to, and

weave entire ways of being – symbolizing and signaling,

representing, inventing and modifying habits and capacities

- economic, political, religious, social, scientific,

cognitive, communicative and cultural – into human-material

artifacts of a particular and limited kind. All of human

experience leaves traces, but not all can be textualized, or

can only be woven through other material mediums by

different modes and methods. A text will never dance. A

text is unable to sing. A text cannot provide intonation

and facial expressions or “body language.” To question a


text is to improvise new texts. To engage a text is to

recontextualize. The artifacts of texts upon each

interaction are a new site of entanglement between humans

and things. Improvisation. Innovation with persistent

matter and previous marks. One way we record our

entanglements.

The text idea allows the analyst of culture to extract a portion of ongoing social action – discourse or some nondiscursive but nevertheless semiotic action – from its infinitely rich, exquisitely detailed context, and draw a boundary around it, inquiring into its structure andmeaning. This textual fragment of culture can then be re-embedded by asking how it relates to its ‘context’, where context is understood as nonreadable surround or background (or if the context is regarded as readable, by asking how the text relates to its ‘co-text’)(Silverstein & Urban, 1996, p. 1, italics added)

The circulation of artifacts – “in which the abstract

aspect of language as shared meaning-bearing system is seen

to depend on the replication and circulation of discourse in

the world and about the world” (Urban, 1998, p. 582).

Every utterance not only says something in itself (i.e.about the world, about an extralinguistic referent of some kind), but it also says something about itself, and hence, every ‘pragmatics’ (every way of handling language) goes hand in hand with a ‘metapragmatics’ (comments about and references to the way of handling


language)…in other words, participants mark those partsof speech that are ‘text’ and those that are ‘instructions about how that discourse is to be approached as a text, through replication or with some form of response’…a phase in the history of discourse and not just a seemingly atemporal projection of discourse from one ‘stable’ context onto another(Blommaert, 2004, pp. 13–14)

Weaving, texture, textility. If the world of humans-

and-things-in-relation weaves itself into artifacts and

technologies of culture, society, communication and

commerce, so those artifacts carry on - entangling disparate

cultures, societies, artifacts and technologies toward

continual improvisation and adaptation. Texts, as graphic

marks in coordinately suitable materials, create new

contexts – formal contexts such as lists, tables, matrices,

contracts and accounts; conventional contexts like languages

and dialects, dictionaries, encyclopedias and fields of

discourse; cognitive contexts – notions of contradiction and

evidence, syllogisms and arguments, boundaries,

classifications and generalizing norms; (among many other

effects both procedural and productive) – with “long-term

effects on the organization of society and the forms and

contents selected” (Bernstein, 2013; Goody, 1977, 1986,


2000; Havelock, 1986; Killeen & Forshaw, 2007; McNeely,

2008; Olson, 1996; Ong, 1982). Indeed, “one of the basic

philological precepts states that ’the text knows more than

the author’, that it is not we who know, but first and

foremost a certain condition of ours which knows”(Gitelman,

2013, pp. 111–112). This paper has been an attempt to

elucidate the extent and largesse of formations of textual

artifacts and to indicate their ongoing niche in the world.

There is no question that graphic constructions,

alphanumeric systems, and literacies for recording and

utilizing recorded information have had gargantuan effects

in the becoming of humankind. It is evident that the

technologies, capabilities, knowledge and skills involved in

the materialization of recorded information are one among

many of “myriad tactical improvisations by which actual

living organisms co-opt whatever possibilities their

environments may afford to make their ways in the tangle of

the world” (Hallam & Ingold, 2007, p. 5). In the exchange

of recorded information (word or line, map or figure) among

literate (or graphic-system-based cultures) we often miss


where the exchange or relationship of the thing is, and the

myriad ways in which the things make us.

Conclusion

“We are only human through things” (Hodder, 2012, p. 221)

Textual artifacts and recorded information come about

through large and complex processes of human groups

interacting with their material surround. The ways people

do these things form technologies in which humans depend on

things, things depend on other things, and these things

depend on humans. Things do fall apart - they transform,

die, change, decay, run out. “The defining aspect of human

entanglement with made things [artifacts] is that humans get

caught in a double-bind, depending on things that depend on

humans” (Hodder, 2011, p. 154).

Recorded information are material artifacts that depend

on humans for their selection, collection, preservation and

maintenance. Their material constitution and artifactual

value as woven textures of social human becoming gather

together a vast evidence of human-material relating and are


themselves entities of evidence - fresh contexts for human

improvisation. Libraries and librarians, museums and their

curators present a field of humans on which these things

depend - to organize, utilize and disseminate information

artifacts and to keep them entangled in the ongoing

evolution of culture. Concepts such as entanglement,

stigmergy, emergence and improvisation offer important ways

of evidencing and promoting the significance of recorded

information as well as the importance for our societies of

collecting, organizing, preserving and disseminating these

artifacts in and through our cultures.


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