Abstract
The invention of literacy was also the invention of written information. Humanly usable information has been (and will likely continue to be for the foreseeable future) tied to human documents. Any order we impose on or find in information is closely tied to human uses that give rise to it or for which it is repurposed, and those orders are expressed in the documentary genres that mediate human communicative action within social activity systems. These social forms of genres and activity systems shape our consciousnesses, cognitive capacities, social identities, and potentials for action. Making sense of a single claim, sentence, or even datum requires an understanding of what kind of text it appears in, engaged in what sort of inquiry using what methods, and where it stands within the evolving intertextual discussion of the field. Sense making requires integrity of the text and visibility of the provenance and socio-historic dynamic from which it arises. Even as the processes of communication have been less tied to immediate social circumstances, they have fostered new kinds of social relations and communicative circumstances that maintain their social character and functionality. As we convert older technologies of information storage based on the physical texts, to digital technologies that can readily draw together heterogeneous pieces from more heterogeneous circumstances, the user ultimately must make sense of the information, and the technologies will need to find ways to support that sense making.
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A version of this article was published in Danish as: Systemer for dokumenter, systemer for aktivitet og systemer for information. In Nielsen, H. Høyrup, H, and Christensen, H. (Eds.). Nye Vidensmedier: Kultur, Læring, Kommunikation. pp. 63–78, 2011.