Intelligent Environments

LANGUAGE, SPACE AND INFORMATION

Language, Space and Information

Richard Coyne

This chapter illustrates the diversity and incompatibility of different concepts

of information technology and space. I survey the connections between

information technology and space with an understanding of four dominant

contemporary schools of philosophy and language. These are systems theory,

pragmatism, critical theory and deconstruction. Here I aim to show what is

at stake in adopting each of them, and I hope to advance the discussion of

the spatial implications of information technology by presenting these

positions in an ordered way. Elsewhere, I elaborate upon the implications of

these positions for the design and use of computer systems (Coyne, 1995).

In systems theory, information and space are linked primarily through

the notion of the logical proposition. There is an ideal or essential language

behind natural language which is expressible through the proposition.

Propositions are a sentence's information content. Information underlies

language, but also other phenomena such as space. I show how the systems

theoretical view presents space as being transcended by information, in that

electronic communications overcome the constraints of space, and the

essential informational component of space (primarily measurement along a

coordinate system) is presented as able to be represented and manipulated in

CAD and virtual reality systems. By contrast, pragmatism presents a different

view of language in which the holistic realm of situated context takes

precedence over the proposition. Logical propositions are not what underlie

a sentence but they are tools to be used and understood in particular

interpretive and practical contexts. Also, coordinate systems do not provide

access to the essential nature of space but are practical constructs placed

against other aspects of our experience of space. I relate Martin Heidegger's

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(1962) account of "being-in-the-world" as a demonstration of the primacy

of practical space. As an elaboration of the pragmatic view of language and

space, the critical theory school identifies the way in which concepts of

language based around the proposition conceal and promote a pernicious

technological thinking that instills social inequalities. So, too, orthodox

concepts of space partition space in ways that reinforce and promote

structures of domination. Certain critical theorists suggest that space is

always socially constructed and that we need to recognize this in order to

free ourselves from these structures. Finally, Derrida's radical deconstructive

strategy (1976) further unsettles the propositional basis of language (and other

orthodoxies), and also shows how the conquest of space normally associated

with writing (and by inference print and electronic communications) has

always been present in language. By implication, there is nothing transcendent

about electronic communications. Derrida also sees space as social and resists

any attempt to disclose its essence as information. Each of these positions is

outlined in detail in this chapter.

Systematic Space

What is information? The concept of information features prominently

among systems theorists, cognitive scientists and some analytical philosophers.

A survey of the field is provided by Fox (1983), who also outlines the

problems of information from the point of view of systems theory. Fox takes

the ordinary language usage of 'information' as his starting point. The view

of information developed by the systems theorists Shannon and Weaver

(1971) is that there are sentences and these yield information content.

Information is placed into sentences by the person writing or speaking

those sentences, and information is conveyed by the sentences as they are

transported around in books, conveyed through the air as sounds or passed

through electronic networks. The information is then unpacked from the

sentences by someone reading, hearing or otherwise interpreting the sentences.

According to this view, sentences have 'information content'. This view

of information trades in the metaphor of containment (information is to

sentences as water is to a vessel) and the metaphor of the conduit (information

is passed through channels from a transmitter to a receiver).

According to Fox, information is a less mysterious concept if seen simply

in terms of the 'proposition'. What is a proposition? According to the early

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