well, i think that consciousness arises within and is tangled with an environment.  i would say that veridical experience - actual experience of the world - has aspects or portions of the external world as part of its content: a position known as "externalism." it's associated with the excellent philosopher mark rowlands, among others, though i tied to contribute  to its theory too in the early 90s. or as i put it, we are "fused" to what we experience. now consciousness has representative aspects: dreams, hallucinations, and memories probably all have representational aspects. but the fundamental spur, origin, content, relation cannot be like the relation of a picture to what it's a picture of or even information to what it's information about. what you're doing is putting up a screen between consciousness and world, but you don't buy anything by this move: an "idea," "image," sense-datum" or bundle of info, requires a perceiver or interpreter precisely as much as does a world, and you end up with an infinite regress of humunculi. or at least, that's my posish! 

i might just throw in that going informational is a natural metaphor for consciousness for this era, and for scientists working on computers. or it's a natural extension of all the ai-type modeling dominating philosophy of mind since the 70s. it's also the model for understanding dna, for example, right at this moment. but we need to distinguish between useful metaphors and actually contentful or fundamental theories.