The Informand

Automating technologies externalize the work of the body, producing as their ultimate object the robot (a name, we ought always remember, that derives from worker). Informating technologies externalize the work of the mind or of language, but in an important sense they do not produce an object. What they produce is rather an intersection of objects and events -- a text -- or as Barthes calls it a "social space" of communication (1986, 64). Following suggestions first made to me by my partner Nancy Kaplan, I will call the object-event an informand. The informand is the virtual space or dynamic network of linguistic possibilities created when workers collaborate by means of an informating technology. Examples of informands include a telephone conversation, an email discussion thread, a jointly authored memo or report, and a collaborative hypertext.

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