Linguistic Theory
My definition of information and communication is taken from George Lakoff. Lakoff is a linguist involved with developing new directions in the study of language and mind. (Boal and Brook, p.276) Lakoff is quite critical of the conventional metaphor of communication, a concept called the conduit metaphor, a basic metaphor discovered by Michael Reddy. The conduit metaphor asserts that people's major metaphor for communication comes out of a "general metaphor for the mind in which ideas are taken as objects and thoughts are taken as the manipulation of objects".(Boal and Brook, p.116) Storage and retrieval are important to such a metaphor. People must have a way of storing and recalling the objects they have experienced. Applied to communication the metaphor works in the following way. Ideas are objects that can be put into words. Language is the container for the ideas. Ideas are sent over a conduit or channel of communication to another person by way of words. The other person then extracts the ideas from the words. Such a metaphor entails that ideas "can be extracted and can exist independently of people". The conduit metaphor suggests that meaning is independent of beings who understand words. Lakoff finds fault in this system. He asserts that in order for the hearer to understand the speaker they both must be speaking the same language and, more importantly, have the same conceptual system. The idea of conceptual systems makes subcultures important to information exchange. Putting ideas in the correct words is not enough to get ideas across to another person. Experiences and prior knowledge are essential to the communication to knowledge. What Lakoff is presenting is the problem of incommensurability. People from different research traditions cannot communicate effectively. Thomas Kuhn clearly defines the problem of incommensurability in Structures of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn writes" Can anything more than profound confusion be indicated by this admixture of diverse fields and concerns?" (p.9) In this quote, Kuhn is referring to different scientific paradigms communicating. I propose that all communication is susceptible to incommensurability. Such a definition of information exchange is paramount to the argument that the Web is an alienating technology.