 Unfortunately there is not a completely satisfying and philosophically rigorous definition available, though there are at least two very good starting points. For those troubled by the ontological questions regarding information, we might want to simply focus on the symbols and define information as any meaningfully ordered set of symbols.  Mathematicians and engineers prefer to focus on this aspect of information, which is called “syntax” and leave the meaningfulness of information or its “semantics” for others to figure out. Claude E. Shannon working at Bell Labs in the forties produced a landmark mathematical theory of communication (1948).  In this work he utilized his experiences in cryptography and telephone technologies to work out a mathematical formulation describing how syntactical information can be turned into a signal that is transmitted in such a way as to mitigate noise or other extraneous signals which can then be decoded by the desired receiver of the message (Shannon 1948; Shannon and Weaver 1949). The concepts described by Shannon, (along with additional important innovations made by others who are too many to list), explain the way that information technology works, but we still have the deeper questions to resolve if we want to thoroughly trace the impact of information technologies on moral values. Some philosophers noted the fact that information technologies had highlighted the distinction between syntax and semantics, and have been vocal critics about the inability of technologies to bridge the gap between the two concepts.  Meaning that while information technologies might be adept at manipulating syntax, they would be incapable of ever understanding the semantics, or meanings, of the information upon which they worked.