Information and Its Meaning – A Fundamental Building Block of Modern Life

The term “information” refers to any sort of data that is of significance to a human being. Information is a very important commodity. It is the basis of many businesses, markets, organizations and governments. Just about everything that we do on a daily basis is somehow related to information.

In a nutshell, information is processed, organized and structured data organized so that it gives meaning to other data. It allows decision making or strategic decision making, provides context to other data, and gives context to various types of audiovisual information. For instance, a particular customer’s sale in a particular restaurant is discrete data, this becomes information only when the company is able to identify which most popular or least popular dishes are served by customers.

As you can see, information is one of the fundamental building blocks of our modern life. Therefore, if you wish to see complete definition of “information”, you should define it in the scientific community’s lingo, which is fuzzy. You will probably get a definition along the lines of “existing knowledge” or “known facts”. In my opinion these are fine definitions, however, when people are trying to decide how much information must be contained in a document, paper, report or other such document, they fail to realize that there is no such thing as absolute information. As long as the writer establishes some relationship between facts and knowledge, this information becomes considered factual and therefore is in fact “flimsy” information.