Marian Mazur, “Informacja — dezinformacja — pseudoinformacja” (‘Information — Disinformation — Pseudoinformation’), the weekly Argumenty 1967, no. 22 (468), pp. 1 and 6–7; from the series “O szkole cybernetycznie” (‘On School, Cybernetically’).
When is a transmission faithful, and when does it add, lose or blur something along the way? Mazur puts this question to teachers, because their profession is the passing on of information and is therefore a cybernetic process. He offers them his classification as a tool for checking their own lessons for distortions, and offers the school the idea of basing learning on general rules from which the details can be reconstructed without rote learning; he illustrates this with a simple memory test.
The core of the article is a division of transmissions according to what the image does to the original. When the images carry something other than the originals, we have disinformation in three varieties: adding what was not there (simulative disinforming), passing over in silence what was there (dissimulative disinforming), and reversal (confusive disinforming). When it is not known whether the image is faithful, we are dealing with pseudoinformation; its sources include, among others, ambiguous words and signals whose absence can mean two different things. The author also breaks faithful transmission down into cases: identity, equality, similarity, and the cancelling out of a distortion by a second transformation (with the participation of intermessages). In the book these correspond to identity transinforming, equality transinforming, analogue transinforming and compensative transinforming.
The division rests on a few basic concepts derived from physics: control changes neither the amount of energy nor that of matter, only their distribution, that is, their structure. Information is the structure of a set of states used in control, and the states that carry it are messages: originals at the beginning of the path, images at its end, while the way of passing from the former to the latter is a code. Examples from geography, measurement and translation illustrate these concepts; separately, the author shows how transferring information, when the image carries the same as the original, differs from processing it.
The text is an accessible preview of Jakościowa teoria informacji (‘A Qualitative Theory of Information’), published three years later; an editorial note says explicitly that the classification presented comes from that book, then in preparation.