information (noun) — sense 1

And now we come to the third keystone, information.⁸ Information may be thought of as a reduction in entropy—as the ingredient that distinguishes an orderly, structured system from the vast set of random, useless ones.⁹ Imagine pages of random characters tapped out by a monkey at a typewriter, or a stretch of white noise from a radio tuned between channels, or a screenful of confetti from a corrupted computer file. Each of these objects can take trillions of different forms, each as boring as the next. But now suppose that the devices are controlled by a signal that arranges the characters or sound waves or pixels into a pattern that correlates with something in the world: the Declaration of Independence, the opening bars of “Hey Jude,” a cat wearing sunglasses. We say that the signal transmits information about the Declaration or the song or the cat.¹⁰