This content was published by Andrew Tomazos and written by several hundred members of the former Internet Knowledge Base project.

POV and experience

Information is indeed too narrow a word. The computer user is experiencing the effects of previous people's choices. These choices in turn are very much limited by each person's point of view.

Try discussing some of the difficulties of internationalization with a monolingual and monocultural person, to get a good example of this... or of accessibility with someone who has never had to think consciously about any physical action . ;)

Classification itself, a very linear method, limits our experiences. There are always overlaps between any non-binary definitions. Simply saying, male/female, plant/animal, file/program doesn't change the reality that entities still exist in both 'exclusive' classes at once.

Then we enter the realm of communication via language. A language itself is a huge compromise between the people who speak it. Any single word used between any two people never means _exactly_ the same thing to both of them. So naming things, to classify them, is an extremely muddy process. It doesn't actually clarify things much at all, but we need the process so much that we have to believe in it.

This is why stretching the boundaries is such a healthy activity. Are we really limited by X? Y? Could we use Z instead? Y not?

It's the people who can work with these POVs without being blinded by them who have the most choices, and thus are so often the builders of our future.

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