The information field represents a third force that is vital to our future well being. Sure we need technological advances and we need to understand how to leverage economic benefit from all the data that is out there, but as we now enter the first century in which more than half the world resides in an urban environment, the emerging socio-technical world in which we all reside needs to be understood as more than a computing and business environment. Without this other perspective we will not attend fully to important matters of policy and governance, design and interaction, curation and accuracy, and education and enhancement in our lives. The trouble with most discussions of information is they are tied so closely to a narrow view of technology that it is easy to lose sight of how enveloped we are becoming in new practices, behaviours and experiences. Yet it is these very human and cultural aspects which will prove vital to our ability to shape the kind of world in which we wish to live. I employed the term ‘third force’ in recent talks to emphasize how important it is for those of us in the information field to engage actively when the other forces of dominate discussions of how the future will be. I am not beating up on the business or technological agenda of others, I accept them as necessary. But I do object to discussions of information and our world being dominated by business and technological interests. If technology meeting the free market is all we need, why do I have to pay for bundled cable rather than the channels I actually watch? Why do libraries have to purchase journals they never use to get access to a few the scholars they support really read? Why are DVDs regionalized for playback? Why must I upgrade my software and hardware on a manufacturer’s cycle rather than my genuine need? Why are my 10 year old floppy disks gathering dust but my 50 year old vinyl records still sounding joyous? Why is educational software so bad, and gaming software so violent? Why must I limit the use of my own words once I agree to have them published in a scholarly journal? Why is most policy on information infrastructure so out of touch with our professional and personal lives? Who will steward our cultural resources when there is no obvious profit margin to be gained? And don’t forget all the other questions about access to information, the right to read what you want, the accuracy of information and so forth. The answers to these questions might point you in a new direction for thinking about our world and how we want it to be. May the third force be with you!
What is Google up to?
One of my students pointed me to a good read in the New Yorker on Google: http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/070205fa_fact_toobin. The subject of just what google might be up to has been an intriguing one for me recently, what with my own university joining the great digitization project and rumors circulating at recent conferences on the company’s purchases of dark fiber networks. Toobin makes the comment at the end of his article that “it’s folly to judge the company’s behavior on moral grounds. Its shareholders certainly don’t.” Is this really so? Are we not all stakeholders in this information space and don’t we have an interest in how access to the published work is controlled? Google’s corporate page contains several interesting quotes http://www.google.ca/corporate/index.html:
“Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”
” As a business, Google generates revenue by providing advertisers with the opportunity to deliver measurable, cost-effective online advertising that is relevant to the information displayed on any given page. This makes the advertising useful to you as well as to the advertiser placing it.”
Oh well, that’s alright then.
Citizendium launches
A competitor to Wikipedia has been officially launched this week (though it’s been around for a while): Citizendium, a somewhat rough looking ‘citizens compendium of everything’ promises to be loosely controlled and edited, and to offer ‘gentle oversight’ that improves on Wikipedia. You can check it out at http://www.citizendium.org/ but will need to sign up to really view it. I had a few wrinkles doing so with Safari on my Mac but did so eventually and chose the random page option to get a feel for it. I was taken to an entry, as luck would have it, on Sean O Casey, the Irish writer which admitted at the end that this article “was originally based on, and may contain material from, the Wikipedia entry with this title”. Of course I had to try that out and found that is certainly was based on it. In fact, it was it, practically word for word with only minor editing and minus the image. Further reading reveals a decision to fork Wikipedia articles for Citizendium but this is now under review and as the discussion surrounding the resource indicates, there is currently an experiment ongoing to unfork all these articlees to encourage new, original versions from people. This makes Citizendium a real-time experiment in human behavior in information space. It will make for interesting viewing.
From chips to groups
Two news stories breaking today point to the range of information issues in contemportary life. First, researchers at CIT and UCLA have developed a super dense computer chip that is the size of a white blood cell, opening the door to another level in computational design. Meanwhile, the New York Stock Exchange is adopting new technology that will lessen the need for traders to jump about, shouting and jostling, in return for a quieter, PDA-enabled process. Today, the exchange officially goes paperless (heard that one before?). The links between these stories will not be made often but these are related events, representing possible extremes of enquiry for those interested in information related issues. Is the ability to draw these relationships meaningfully a measure of the information field’s value or should we just consider these two very different events?
The attention economy: image or immolation?
In a world of data smog it’s clear that gaining attention is becoming a major concern for business, politicians, charities and even academics. You can find an interesting review of Richard Lanham’s book “The Economy of Attention” at: http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue11_11/goldhaber/index.html. You might want to think about your attention and how it gets captured before you do a search on Malachi Richster. He set fire to himself in Chicago earlier this month as a protest against the war in Iraq. Wikipedia claims he gained notoriety for this but I question this. Did that news filter through to you? Should it have? Coverage seems more prolific in the blogosphere but one might feel that an event such as this, whether you think him a martyr or a madman, warrants more of our attention than what passes for news daily on all major channels. As Goldharber says in his review of Lanham’s book, a new kind of economy will require a somewhat new kind of economics, and the argument is just what this will be. Sadly, it seems while we are waiting to find out, it may already be decided for us, only not just by economists.