The Modern Invention of Information: Discourse, History, and Power (review)

This book should be required reading for all LIS students and practitioners, including (dare I say it) teaching staff. In a little under 140 pages, Day packs together a whole series of arguments that raise fundamental questions about the purpose and practice of information studies today. While beautifully written and to the point, The Modern Invention of Information is nonetheless not always an easy read. The reason is simple: Day is prepared to confront matters that others too often treat as self-evident, starting with the commonsense understandings of information that inform our daily practice. Indeed, as he points out in reference to critical theory, "[c]ritical language cannot be 'clear and distinct' in the manner of the modern sense of the term 'information' if such language has the task of wresting knowledge from information" (129). Having said that, readers who are prepared in turn to grapple with this book's more difficult passages stand to be well rewarded by their effort.

Day's central argument is as follows: the dominant narratives that seek to "explain" the nature of information in modern society must themselves be explained rather than accepted on their own terms. If instead we approach such narratives in a critical manner, one prepared to interrogate their rhetorical devices so as to reinstate the very "ambiguity and the problems of reading, interpreting, and constructing history" (3) that they have sought to elide, then we will make a number of interesting discoveries. Not least, we will find that not only have such narratives attempted to erase their own historical and social premises but also that each in its own way is fully implicated in the "plays of power and ideology" (5) that characterize our late modern age.

The book illustrates this argument through four central chapters. These examine in turn the documentation projects of Paul Otlet and Suzanne Briet; the understandings of communication developed by Norbert Wiener, Claude E. Shannon, and Warren Weaver; Pierre Levy's appropriation and détournement of Gilles Deleuze's and Felix Guattari's notion of the "virtual"; and, finally, the counternarratives to be found in the works of Martin Heidegger and Walter Benjamin. While each chapter stands alone as an elegant case study, in combination they build toward the book's conclusion, with its pithy critique of the positivist sins of omission that imbue so much of LIS scholarship today. For as Day points out,

[S]uch questions as, "Why is it important to 'have' information?" "What does it mean to be 'information literate'?" "What is the nature of the 'information society'?" or even "What are the specific characteristics of 'information technologies'?" are rarely, in any fundamental way, asked, at least with any social, political, and historical depth. (116)

Or as Elvis Costello once sang, "It's the words that we don't say / That scare me so."

Day ends the book with a challenge, calling on readers to rethink how "information" is constructed and to ponder how serious the stakes surrounding this term have become. If he is right in suggesting that "[i]nformation is the quality of being informed," then it is also true that this observation provides only a starting point for the real adventure, since "the nature of knowledge, as well as of the world and the subject, [are] still to be formed and discovered" (120). In other words, the ball is firmly in our court. In the face of social forces that seek to reduce information to nothing more than a thing that can be bought and sold, what will we make of the potential that lies within us and before us?