Table Of ContentWhat Is Information?
ELECTRONIC MEDIATIONS
Series Editors: N. Katherine Hayles, Peter Krapp, Rita Raley, and Samuel Weber
Founding Editor: Mark Poster
55 What Is Information?
Peter Janich
54 Deconstruction Machines: Writing in the Age of Cyberwar
Justin Joque
53 Metagaming: Playing, Competing, Spectating, Cheating, Trading, Making, and
Breaking Videogames
Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux
52 The Perversity of Things: Hugo Gernsback on Media, Tinkering, and Scientifiction
Hugo Gernsback
Edited by Grant Wythoff
51 The Participatory Condition in the Digital Age
Darin Barney, Gabriella Coleman, Christine Ross, Jonathan Sterne, and
Tamar Tembeck, Editors
50 Mixed Realism: Videogames and the Violence of Fiction
Timothy J. Welsh
49 Program Earth: Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a
Computational Planet
Jennifer Gabrys
48 On the Existence of Digital Objects
Yuk Hui
47 How to Talk about Videogames
Ian Bogost
46 A Geology of Media
Jussi Parikka
45 World Projects: Global Information before World War I
Markus Krajewski
44 Reading Writing Interfaces: From the Digital to the Bookbound
Lori Emerson
43 Nauman Reiterated
Janet Kraynak
42 Comparative Textual Media: Transforming the Humanities in the Postprint Era
N. Katherine Hayles and Jessica Pressman, Editors
41 Off the Network: Disrupting the Digital World
Ulises Ali Mejias
40 Summa Technologiae
Stanisław Lem
39 Digital Memory and the Archive
Wolfgang Ernst
38 How to Do Things with Videogames
Ian Bogost
(continued on page 189)
WHAT IS
INFORMATION?
Peter Janich
Translated by Eric Hayot and Lea Pao
ELECTRONIC MEDIATIONS 55
University of Minnesota Press
MINNEAPOLIS LONDON
Originally published in German as Was ist Information? Kritik einer Legende.
Copyright 2006 Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt am Main. All rights reserved by
and controlled through Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin.
English translation copyright 2018 by the Regents of the University of
Minnesota
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written
permission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
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Minneapolis, MN 55401- 2520
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Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper
The University of Minnesota is an equal- opportunity educator and employer.
22 21 20 19 18 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Janich, Peter, author. | Hayot, Eric, translator. | Pao, Lea, translator.
Title: What is information? / Peter Janich; translated by Eric Hayot and Lea Pao.
Other titles: Was ist Information? English
Description: Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, [2018] | Series: Electronic
mediations; 55 | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017022054| ISBN 978-1-5179-0008-3 (hc) | ISBN 978-1-5179-0009-0 (pb)
Subjects: LCSH: Information science–Philosophy. | Communication–Philosophy.
Classification: LCC Z665 .J24 2018 | DDC 020.1–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017022054
To the memory of Fernand Hayot: father, reader, scientist
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CONTENTS
Translators’ Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix
ERIC HAYOT AND LEA PAO
1. Information and Myth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
2. Legacies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
3. Articles of Faith . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
4. Information Concepts Today . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59
5. Methodical Repair Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127
6. Consequences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161
Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163
Peter Janich: A Partial Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179
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TRANSLATORS’ INTRODUCTION
Eric Hayot and Lea Pao
Today, “information” is a concept with an extraordinarily broad reach.
It touches on various aspects of engineering, where its lineage goes
back to Claude Shannon’s 1948 “Mathematical Theory of Communi-
cation.” Via engineering, information enters the arenas of theoretical
physics (where it is construed at times as the primary ontological unit
of the universe), evolutionary biology (where it figures the relation be-
tween organism and environment), and cybernetics (whose feedback
loops and recursive structures amble toward the dream of artificial
intelligence). “Information” in a post- Shannonian sense also figures in
sociology (in the work of Niklas Luhmann or Harold Garfinkel) and
in various iterations of the concept of the “information society” (the
term makes its first appearance in Masuda Yoneji’s 1976 The Information
Society as Post- industrial Society; by 2003, it was the theme for a United
Nations– sponsored World Summit in Geneva). “Information” is a
major theme in the field of library science (and the schools of informa-
tion that foster it); it circulates around the edges of a wide variety of
media theory; and it makes its appearance in contemporary anxieties
about the rise of Big Data, the promise and threat of the information
ix
