Imagine a hypothetical delivery man. He has a parcel he has to deliver and a document that specifies how it is to be delivered. The document describes where to delivery it, who to deliver it to, whether it has to be signed for or not and so on.
Our hypothetical deliveryman arrives at the address specified on the document. He sees that the name on the office door corresponds to the person who is supposed to be receiving the parcel. The person isn’t there. What does the deliver man do? He looks at the document and sees that it says the parcel has to be signed for but doesn’t say who has to sign it, so he goes to the office next door and says, “Do you mind signing for this? It’s for so-and-so next door. Great thanks. I’ll just leave it on his chair.”
The point of the story is that the deliveryman did not literally do what the document, said which was to deliver the parcel to so-and-so at some address. Instead, he left it for so-and-so and got someone else to sign for it. This is a perfectly normal human process. Everything we do by way of following an instruction of some sort involves interpretation. We mediate between the abstractions represented by the instructions and what actually happens in the world around us.
What is on the deliveryman’s document is data, the mediation process is information. If you prefer, information is interpreted data, or putting it another way, information is data that has consequences.
Let’s look at this in the context of people buying and selling goods. In a traditional store, the customer can see and touch the goods being bought. There is eye contact, speech, and tangible, physical presence between the customer and the merchant. This presence provides a context for the experience that results in an immediate understanding of what is being offered and what is being asked. It is the basis for a rich information exchange involving the customer and the merchant, and the customer and the general environment in which the interaction occurs. There are many dimensions to this but, for example, recent studies have indicated there are regions in the brain that react to the presence of others by an internal mimicking process that involves a literal replaying of the other’s actions involving the same neural processes as though the observer were doing the action themselves. This profound influence between physically present participants in an exchange is very difficult to replace in situations involving distance learning, remote working and contractual interactions carried out where the participants are not physically present.
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