In a recent MediaPost Online Media Daily article Bernardo Huberman of HP Labs is credited as having said the following in a presentation regarding Hewlett-Packard’s redesign of its Web site:

The value of information is giving way to individual expression as more people post on Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites. And as the value of information degrades, media managers are attempting to harness that individual expression. [Emphasis Added]

This is an intuitive distinction, but also potentially a misleading one. In this instance there seems to be a clear delineation between the two (”information” and “expression”), made clear in the article’s description of HP’s project:

[HP.com] supports about 82,000 product descriptions and 130 million hits monthly…HP has added customer support forums and detailed some of the company’s plans such as adding lifestyle features focused on gaming, for example. Also in the works are custom navigation tools that allow people to create and share user-generate content.

Product descriptions are the only example of “information” given here, but 82,000 is still a lot. Not mentioned are all the drivers and other support software to download, manuals, troubleshooting instructions, warranty documentation, support agreement management (for 81 different countries!) and other little pieces of knowledge floating about. Is the value of all that information really degrading? Are installation instructions for a printer really giving way to someone’s individual expression on Facebook?

My guess is no. More power to HP for evolving their site in a more social direction but I can’t imagine the majority of their 130 million monthly visitors would be pleased to find themselves unable to locate the driver for their scanner through all the user-generated content. To be sure, there is a way to achieve what the article describes as HP’s goals without such negative consequences while also improving the Web site and the brand.

However, stating the premise of and motivation for these changes in such oppositional terms gives a false impression about the relationship between “information” and”expression”. It’s worth noting that both times “expression” is explicitly “individual”. This subtly reflects the root of the categorical distinction being made: information is general, abstract and universal; expression is specific, personal and local. Organizations put information on the Web; individuals express themselves on the Web.

The first and most basic problem is that the two in no way trade off. If someone tweets that they are having trouble with their printer I bet at least as many people respond with a link to the manufacturer’s site or ask if they’d checked there yet as offer their own helpful advice. Now, if it turns out the manufacturer’s site is of no help at all then it’s reasonable to expect such a user to twitter about that. That’s where reaching out to and communicating directly with consumers is helpful, but that hardly means that an increase in the prevalence of social media makes information less important. On the contrary, failing to make sought after information readily and usefully available might be what precipitates the dissatisfaction that makes companies think they need to offer more space for expression rather than improve their core information offering.

The second and more interesting problem is what to do with Wikipedia. Is it information or expression? With the recent news that Britannica is following Wikipedia to a user-contribution model, a rigid information/expression distinction might end up classifying a 240 year-old encyclopedic touchstone as suddenly a bunch of “individual expression” and no longer a source of “information”.

That probably won’t happen to either Wikipedia or Britannica because they are organizations. Even though Wikipedia is created by a collaboration of a lot of individuals, there is an institutional force behind it that makes its content meaningful in a special way that gets designated as informative. The CNN twitter would also probably get called information for the same reason. But what about the individuals tweeting from the earthquake in China or breaking the news of the London subway bombings on flickr? Those people informed the world of those events; mere “individual expression”?

But to return to HP and a less dramatic example, are consumer reviews of a particular printer model any more “expression” or less “information” than the corporate description of it? Certainly people use those reviews to make decisions and so are informative for them at least. And certainly the way HP describes its own products expresses something about the brand as well as informs.

And so the situation is murky at best. If the distinction does just fall back on “only big organizations get to decide what counts as information, everyone else is just playing around”, then everything good that the Web has to offer in terms of the flexible and accessible production and distribution of knowledge is sacrificed for the sake of a clear definition of authority. I’m not calling Mr. Huberman in particular a reactionary here (I or MediaPost may have taken him out of context after all), but this sentiment or variations on it seem to appear somewhat frequently. I’m also not going to say that more open Web hasn’t resulted in a lot YouTube comments the world would be far better off without. As I said, it’s murky.

But in any event, framing the Social Web and the Knowledge Web in opposition to one another is an mistake that moves thought about the future of the Web in the wrong direction.