The Information Manifold

The book begins from the fact that there is no shared agreement on what information is. Engineers, computer scientists, economists, linguists and philosophers each take their own route. Badia separates four levels of analysis: syntactic, semantic, pragmatic and network-based.

He explains each approach in turn, drawing on Claude Shannon's theory and Fred Dretske's account of information flow, and he looks at receiver impact and informational interaction. His view is that these theories describe the same phenomena from different angles, each narrower than the one before.

Badia then applies the levels to current problems. Computers work at the syntactic level while people work at the semantic and pragmatic levels, which is why he holds that people must resolve fake news and algorithmic bias. Readers in computing, philosophy of information and technology policy will find the argument engaging. Edition note: published by The MIT Press in 2019, 352 pages, ISBN-13 9780262043038.