The notion that context and meaning are inextricably linked is, of course, by now something of a commonplace in the study of language... These different contexts, however, are not experienced as antithetical or mutually exclusive. Rather, the viewer will choose, consciously or unconsciously, from a number of equally valid contexts, while the object itself remains intractably multi-layered - multi-valent, one might say -- in the almost infinite number of ways in which it is capable of being understood and interpreted. Precisely the same object can be used in radically different contexts and exposed in different ways in order to tell radically opposite stories. This has nothing to do with the problems of decoding the complex messages encoded in works of art, since the argument is not about the works of art at all: any product, any artifact, any object taken from the real world can be subjected to this kind of process.
p. 157, Vergo, Peter 'The Rhetoric of Display', in Miles, R. and Zavala, L. (eds.), Towards the Museum of the Future: European Perspectives, Routledge, London, 1994

Data without structure is babble -- a glossolalia that may appear meaningful but yields nothing.

Think for a moment of a book -- as you break it down into increasingly small stand-alone bits -- chapter, paragraph, sentence, word, letter -- more and more of the meaning disappears. We may be able to surmise a great deal about a novel and its characters by reading one chapter, but hardly anything by reading one paragraph. A sentence can only present us with the barest facts, whilst a word can, at best, summon a general definition.

Information design is ubiquitous and is not necessarily the result of individual creativity. Information may be designed by an individual, eg. a painting or book; by a team, eg. film, popular music, video games etc.; or by an entire culture, eg body language, spoken language, dress codes etc.

This organisation need not be conscious -- indeed, the better that we know a communication medium the less likely that we will have to consciously design our transmissions or decode those of others. The structures of well-known communications media become transparent, invisible to our conscious regard. Our mother-tongue, for example, is so well ingrained in our thought patterns that, in day-to-day life, we don't need to think about what we're going to say before we say it; the thought and conveying the thought are experienced as simultaneous.

The form of transmission determines the interpretation and meaning of the communication. The same phrase will read differently, will mean different things, if, for example, it is in a 6pt footnote, a part of a sentence in a novel or in a technical manual, a chapter heading or title, a newspaper headline or a billboard. It is obvious that meaning is generated by more than the sum of the overtly transmitted informational components, be they words, sequences of images or sounds, or concatenations of gestures.

Meaning constantly escapes the author's control. Roland Barthes, Jacques Derridda and a plethora of post-modernist and post-structuralist theorists have demonstrated that neither author nor audience holds a privileged position in the construction of meaning -- both bring their own version of a work into being, neither capable of pinning it down and permanently fixing its boundaries.

Electronic technologies exacerbate this situation because they are typified by and differentiated from other media by their enhanced potential for interactivity. This may be as trivial as choosing ones own pathway through a site or as profound as collaboratively creating the continuing narrative of a MUD or multi-user game through ones participation.