Media for Information Exchange

A medium is a tool used to exchange information related to some subject matter between an information bearer and an information receiver. Below are some examples of traditional mediums used during the industrial age and I added a couple of new mediums that will very likely be more prominent in the information age.


In order to make use of an information media effectively, the following three conditions must be satisfied:
  • Easy for information bearer to represent information: The effort and difficulty required for the information bearer to successfully formulate the information in the medium must be as low as possible.
  • Clear, consistent meaning: The meaning conveyed by the information bearer to the information receiver must be clear and easily followed by human beings and be consistent between different software applications. The result cannot be a "black box" or a guessing game and users of the information should not be able to derive different information/understanding simply by using a different software application.
  • High-quality information representation: The form in which the information is represented to the receiver must be as good as possible.  The quality must be high whether the information receiver is a human-being or an automated machine-based process such as an intelligent software agent.  Sigma level 6  is a good benchmark, 99.99966% accuracy.
There are two types of communication: direct and mediated. Direct communication is one person having a conversation with another person; if there is a question about information context, those involved in the communication can directly discuss and resolve any context issues.  Mediated communication is indirect and resolving context issues can be more challenging because parties involved in the communication cannot really have a discussion about the immediate context.

Standards based media are better than proprietary media. Vagueness is an enemy of automation. The threat of inaccuracy is an enemy of automation.

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