Information as Thing: Why How We Define Information Matters

What is information? It seems like such a simple question, but it sits at the heart of how our world works. Every search, every library catalog, every algorithm that decides what you see depends on what we mean when we say “information.”

One paper changed how I think about this field: Michael Buckland’s “Information as Thing” (1991). It is not flashy, but it quietly unpacks one of the most important questions of the information age.

The Three Faces of Information

Buckland begins with a simple but powerful idea. We use the word “information” in at least three different ways, and we often confuse them (Buckland, 1991). That confusion matters because every information system we build must work with these meanings.

Information as knowledge is what happens inside us. It is understanding, awareness, or the mental change that occurs when we learn something new. It is intangible and deeply personal (Buckland, 1991).

Information as process is the act of informing or being informed. It is the flow of communication that leads to learning. When you read, watch, or listen and your mind changes in response, that is information as process (Buckland, 1991).

Information as thing is the physical or digital artifact that carries meaning. Books, images, data, files, recordings, and documents are all examples. These are the only forms that information systems can store, search, and retrieve (Buckland, 1991).

Why This Distinction Matters

Libraries, databases, and search engines can only work with information as thing. They cannot directly handle knowledge or process, only the representations that might lead to them. This is the foundation of Buckland’s insight.

The information we want is knowledge, but the information systems can handle is things. Search engines connect us with objects that may help us create knowledge, but they cannot guarantee it. They provide access to the right things and hope that those things become meaningful.

Think about your last online search. You did not receive understanding directly. You received a list of objects: websites, PDFs, videos. You then interpreted those things and created your own knowledge from them. Sometimes it works perfectly, sometimes it does not.

Information Must Be Informative

Buckland notes that for something to count as information as thing, it must be regarded as informative (Buckland, 1991, p. 351). That informativeness depends entirely on the situation and the observer.

A scientific article can be deeply meaningful to an expert and nearly incomprehensible to a beginner. A photograph can reveal everything to one viewer and nothing to another. The same data can tell completely different stories depending on how it is read.

Information systems are built to handle objects, but what makes those objects informative is contextual and subjective. The challenge for information science is to connect the right things to the right people at the right time.

Living in the Age of Information Things

We now live in a world overflowing with information as thing. Billions of documents, images, videos, and data points appear every day. The amount of information created each year continues to grow at an extraordinary rate.

More things do not automatically mean more knowledge. The flood of information can just as easily lead to confusion or overload. Buckland’s framework helps explain why. Information systems are good at organizing and retrieving things, but the human act of transforming those things into understanding remains personal and unpredictable.

Connecting Information Hierarchies to Neural Processing

Research in cognitive neuroscience offers a fascinating parallel. The human brain also organizes and processes information hierarchically. Sensory information enters at the lowest levels, and increasingly abstract representations emerge as it moves through deeper layers of the brain.

Taylor, Hobbs, Burroni, and Siegelmann (2015) found that “progressive functional abstraction over network depth may be a fundamental feature of brains and is observed in artificial networks” (p. 18112). This means that both biological and artificial systems often move from concrete data toward more abstract meaning as information flows through them.

This parallel does not mean brains and information systems are the same, but it suggests that hierarchical organization from simple to complex may be a universal principle of how advanced systems handle information.

Why You Should Care

You use information systems constantly. When a search gives you irrelevant results, it is usually because the system has matched your query to things without understanding whether those things will actually be informative for you.

Once you grasp Buckland’s distinctions, you can see these systems more clearly. You understand that they work with objects, not knowledge. That awareness makes you a smarter searcher, a more critical reader, and a better advocate for systems that help people truly learn.

Questions That Keep Me Thinking

Buckland’s paper leaves me with questions that feel more urgent every year. How do we design systems that adapt to context so that things become more informative for individuals? How do we teach people to interpret information more effectively? And as artificial intelligence improves, can it ever understand what will be truly informative for a specific person, or will it always stop at matching patterns among things?

These questions drive my work because how we define information shapes how we learn, connect, and make sense of the world. Information is not only data or content. It is knowledge, process, and thing, all woven together. Understanding the difference changes how we navigate an information-saturated world.

When have you encountered an information object that transformed your understanding? Or when have you felt overwhelmed by information things that offered no real insight? I would love to hear your thoughts.

References

Buckland, M. K. (1991). Information as thing. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 42(5), 351–360.

Taylor, P., Hobbs, J. N., Burroni, J., & Siegelmann, H. T. (2015). The global landscape of cognition: Hierarchical aggregation as an organizational principle of human cortical networks and functions. Scientific Reports, 5, 18112. https://doi.org/10.1038/srep18112