In the various discourses treating 'information' and information science, a very suggestive and potential understanding of the information phenomenon is surprisingly missing. The following quote by Brookes: “The artifacts which record human knowledge exosomatically become independent of the knowing subjects who created them. These artefacts are no longer subjective and inaccessible but objective and accessible to all who care to study them….” (p. 128) suggests that the various information and knowledge artifactcs contain within themselves objective information and knowledge. If these physical objects carry and transmit the symbols, isn’t it feasible then to think of ‘information’, somehow embedded with the symbols, as the conceptual channel for transmitting ideas, thought, concepts, knowledge? The suggestion of this thought or conceptualization of information would not have been justified if knowledge deposited in knowledge artifacts could not be considered “independent of the knowing subjects who created them”.
Brookes, B.C. (1980). The foundation of information science. Part I. Philosophical aspects. Journal of Information Science, 2, 125-133
