MeBIT – an interdisciplinary project on "information" metaphors and their impact on the idea of man

Abstract

MebIT is an interdisciplinary project granted by the German Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF). Its focus of research concerns the logical interconnections and relationships which combine the Informatics, Information Technology (IT) and Information Systems (IS) fields with other scientific branches – in particular biology/genetics and philosophy – and which are established through the extensive use of metaphors form these fields (like information, programming, code, replication, etc.). The technical endowment of almost all public domains by IT and IS might be accompanied by a mental shift – triggered and promoted by metaphoric language and might ultimately lead to the formation on new images of man. Our research group is composed of four subgroups, dealing with these questions from an information-theoretical, genetic, anthropological and technique-philosophical point of view. Some preliminary results of the joint work of these groups are demonstrated by three interconnected posters.