Strategies for dealing with human information needs: Information or communication?

Picture the communications future: every home linked via cable TV, push‐button phone, and video cassette to virtually every information retrieval bank in the country; every citizen able to efficiently get an answer to every question, a solution for every problem. This picture is but a slight exaggeration of the current expectation of both communication practitioners and researchers for the not too distant future. To this end, practitioners in broadcasting, journalism, library science, and other “information” dissemination professions are devoting mammoth efforts to designing bigger information retrieval systems capable of handling more information. Communication researchers, it seems, have adopted “information” as their key concept for the 1970s. This special section of the Journal of Broadcasting focuses on some of the harsh realities of this future. The first article by Dervin attempts to present an assessment and perspective on the assumptions that underly the current “information” thrust. The second by Bowes looks specifically at the potentialities and limitations of the new media technology. The final article, a conceptual critique by Stamm, emphasizes some issues which may need to become a focus of communications study if in the future we will be able to do “better” as well as do “more” with the new technology.