The Etymology of Information
The word information comes from the Latin informare: in- (within) + formare (to give form, to shape, to mould something). This is seen in philosophy. For Plato, Forms or Ideas are intelligible models of reality. For Aristotle, everything that exists is composed of matter and form. Matter is what something is made of. Form, which he calls morphé, is what organises that matter according to a principle. It is the morphé of language that makes scattered sounds become language rather than noise. Knowing meant receiving form in the intellect. To know (gnosis in Greek, cognoscere in Latin) was to be inwardly configured by the structure of what is known.
For many centuries this understanding was experienced daily. In medieval Europe and in the Byzantine world, for example, architecture, icons, music, the liturgical calendar and the organisation of urban space constantly oriented attention towards the above, to what transcends the individual. Even someone who was illiterate was not, etymologically speaking, uninformed or disinformed. On the contrary. They were deeply informed by those forms that structured daily life.
In modernity, this logic has been inverted. We remain surrounded by rites and symbols, but most of them are horizontal. Advertising, entertainment, social media, news cycles and consumption function as corrupted daily liturgies. Instead of opening vertical axes, they trap us within the plane of constant horizontal circulation and navel-gazing.
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