Chapter 5 Information and the Self

A defining aspect of humans is our self-consciousness; we experience ourselves as selves, and thus the self is a vital theme for information experience. A self can be conceptualized informationally, showing how the information and documents we deal with, and the practices by which we deal with them, constitute who we are. At root, a self is an encapsulation of an entity from its environment. To speak of human selves, this involves a biological encapsulation, a cognitive one, and a conscious one. The biological encapsulation is formed by chemical bonds; the cognitive by perceptual information processing; and the conscious by semantic bonds of narrative and self-awareness. Selves can change within all these encapsulations, and “being informed” simply is this change. Following this theory of the self as well as discussions of the extended mind, we can understand one's information and documents to also in part constitute a person's self. Among these, self-documents are a special case, those documents we create about ourselves (e.g., online profiles), which both represent and modulate who we are.