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it determinate shape, to arrange it, or modify it. A sculptress informs
the clay that she shapes with her hands. In English inform came to
be used more narrowly, first as a synonym for instruct or educate .
When a teacher informs her students she, in a metaphorical way,
Information and communication: the drift from agency 35
shapes them, moulds them, and in doing so impresses knowledge
upon their minds. The abstract noun information used to be
deployed to denote the process or activity of informing just as one
use of formation denotes the process of forming (e.g., compare She
played a key part in the formation of the UN ; She played a key part
in the information of her students ). Information , in its modern
sense, has its roots as an abstract noun that denotes a certain species
of communicative action (just as communication does), where one
speaker intentionally and successfully brings it about that another
party comes to know certain things.
In contemporary English, however, information is not mainly
used to denote acts of communicating or informing. The term is now
used mainly as a metalinguistic term for that which is conveyed in the
process of informing: ideas, knowledge, the contents of our thoughts,
or the contents of communication. It is instructive to note that whilst
information has shifted in this way, communication has not so far,
and is still primarily used to talk about the action of communicating,
rather than the content communicated.5
The conduit and container metaphors
When we talk about information as the content of communication,
or as something that is acquired, stored, conveyed, transmitted,
received, accessed, concealed, withheld, we draw upon a range of
metaphors. There is nothing odd about the use of such metaphors.
They are a firmly entrenched part of our talk about communication.
But these metaphors are not random. They are thematically linked as
variants upon an underlying theme or metaphor, that Michael Reddy
has called the conduit metaphor for communication.6 The conduit
5
However, communication may be drifting in the same direction. We now refer to
communications , meaning what is communicated, not acts of communicating.
6
Michael Reddy, The Conduit Metaphor: A Case of Frame Conflict in our
Language about Language , in A. Ortony, ed., Metaphor and Thought
(Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 284 324. Reddy notes that
the use of such a framework of metaphors both reflects and underscores certain
commitments that we have about the nature of communication: (1) language
36 Rethinking Informed Consent in Bioethics
metaphor views communication as the conveyance or transfer of
something of meaning; ideas; information, or most generally of
content which is contained in speech, texts, emails, hard drives
and CD-ROMs.7 These metaphors highlight the dynamic aspects of
communication, which shifts or transfers content. The metaphors are
equally apt for discussing the transfer of ideas between people and
the transfer of data between technological devices.
These metaphors are closely linked to a further set of thematically
linked static metaphors, which see information as located in one
place or another, so as contained whether in a text, a display or a
human mind. These container metaphors allow us to represent infor-
mation as something that can be possessed by people, that is contained
in signals, messages, texts, CD-ROMs. The two sets of metaphors
work well together. They allow us to think of information as coming
in discrete chunks ( packets ; messages ; signals ), and of the
communication of information as a process, whereby something
that exists in one container is transferred to another. For example:
information in the mind of a speaker (something that is possessed
by the speaker) can be put into words (perhaps stored on a hard
drive, or in a library) then passed on , disclosed , revealed , con-
veyed to , or accessed by a recipient . If the recipient is suitably
functions like a conduit, transferring thoughts bodily from one person to another;
(2) in writing and speaking, people insert their thoughts and feelings in the words;
(3) words accomplish the transfer by containing the thoughts or feelings and
conveying them to others; and (4) in listening or reading, people extract the
thoughts and feelings once again from the words (p. 290). See also Ronald E.
Day, The Conduit Metaphor and The Nature and Politics of Information
Studies , Journal of the American Society for Information Science 9 (2000), 805 11.
7
We should note that within the broad conduit framework there are other more
specific frameworks: transport frameworks (information is carried in vehicles );
postal frameworks ( messages are stored , sent and delivered and received );
transmission frameworks ( signals are transmitted along channels ); broadcast
metaphors (information is posted on the internet (the village tree), or broadcast
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