Information

The discipline of information science studies the way information is made and generated (Borko 3). According to Morville, data "is a string of identified but unevaluated symbols" (46). Information, on the other hand, is "evaluated, validated, or useful data", and knowledge is "information in the context of understanding."

However, Ericson and Haggerty state there is no difference between information and knowledge because "to make sense of a thing there must be institutional frameworks of representation for defining and establishing its logic and what it means" (p.84). This differs from Daniel Bell's (1985) ideas that information is "news, facts, statistics, reports, legislation, tax-codes, judicial decisions, resolutions...but is not necessarily 9or even usually knowledge. Knowledge is interpretation in context, exegesis,relatedness, and conceptualization, the forms of argument" (qtd. in Ericson and Haggerty p. 84). Ericson and Haggerty argue that what Bell says is information is really knowledge because they have been objectified , real meaning used in action with social consequences.

in newsmaking, Barak (1994) says that information is "symbolic bites or commodities of news production and the pictures of social reality that they create" (p.3).

References:

Barak, G. (1994). “Media, Society, and Criminology.” Media, Process, and the Social Construction of Crime: Studies in Newsmaking Criminology. Ed. Gregg Barak. 3-45. Garland Publishing: New York.

Borko, H. "Information Science: What Is It?" American Documentation 19.1 (1968): 3-5. Print.

Ericson, R. V., & Haggerty, K.D. (1997). The Risk Society. In R.V. Ericson & K.D. Haggerty (Eds.) Policing the risk society (pp. 81-130). U of Toronto: Tornoto.

Morville, Peter. Ambient Findability. Sebastopol: O'Reilly, 2005. Print.