Information Wants to Have Meaning. Or Does It?

Although we live in an information age, we don’t really know what information even means.

Nicholas Carr made this observation in his review of James Gleick’s book, The Information. The even more disturbing conclusion of Gleick’s book, however, is not that we lack a tight definition or a thorough understanding of information. As humans, we are deeply troubled by the understanding of information as something devoid of meaning.  

That view is hellish, Gleick tells Big Think in the video below. “It’s connected with our sense that we’re deluged by a flood of meaningless tweets and blogs and the hall of mirrors sensation of imposters, the false and true intermingling.” And this is a scary concept because “as humans what we care about is meaning.”

Watch the video here:

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