The Internet is a complex environment that affords many practices while constraining others.
The challenge is to develop languages and tools to critically engage with these environments
and to navigate the topology of being a citizen in a technologically mediated environment. This
book begins this undertaking. A New Theory of Information & the Internet first documents the
historical emergence of the scientific mathematical computing and human communication
discussions on information together with the rise of information as a resource and a
commodity. It posits that the contemporary situation has not changed in terms of resolving
exactly what information might be as a real thing. What has changed is the idea of information
as a resource and a commodity which has become a cultural trope - a standard way of looking at
information. In the process of examining the understanding of information and communication
this book investigates the notion of an informed citizenry and the possibilities of a public
sphere s online within the context of the increasingly ubiquitous place of the Internet in
social informational life.
