Abstract
Although in an ideal form the information in the world would not involve people, in reality, it has no meaning without people observing and interacting with it. There is a widespread myth (a positivistic view) that information is something in the world that does not depend on people’s point of view and that it is independent of the situation in which it occurs. But information never has fixed significance. The available data is simply the raw material that must be processed. Any particular information element gains significance only from its relationship to other information in the context in which it occurs (Woods, Patterson, & Roth, 2002). However, this chapter tries to minimize those interaction and interpretation aspects, deferring those for the later parts of the book. Instead, it concentrates on the issues of the information in the situation before it gets mentally processed.