Society Eye

Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive. Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy, and recombine — too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient. That tension will not go away.

- Stewart Brand, The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT, 1987

Before the Internet age, production and distribution were the primary influences on the economization of information.

Books and newspapers needed paper, ink and a method of putting the two together.

Next, the media needed a method of circulation in order to spread its information to the public. Books and newspapers sold in a community social hub, or delivered to your door.

Production and distribution needed funding in order to function. Today, the Internet has virtually cut these two costs from the equation.

The catch-22 of Brand’s 20-year-old statement, above, swiftly sums up the dilemma facing the Internet since its creation. As information becomes progressively cheaper to distribute, its popularity – and therefore value – will only increase. So we thought. But is the tension still there?

In my mind, information’s desire is finally being satisfied. Information is now free, and access to it is virtually unlimited. But a service that has no fee cannot be sustained.

The hippies won. As Brand describes in his 1995 Time article “We Owe It All To the Hippies”, it was a core group of post-1960s counter-culture cyberfolk who, under a set of tenets called the “hacker ethic”, won hegemonic control over the direction of the Internet. As a result, the information age continues to “bear the distinctive mark of the counter-culture 60′s well into the new millenium”.

The problem with such as succesful left-wing revolution is that the heart and soul of the Internet – information – may ultimately suffer.

Journalists, information-gatherers, need to get paid for their work.

The inherent problem with all information becoming free is that good information is not easy to come by. Regardless of production, distribution, business and technology, we need talented people to investigate hard news, to provide us with reliable facts, and to go beyond the edge of the world to bring back the unknown.

What we need now is a reevaluation of the economics behind information. Both audience and author need to understand and appreciation the value of the writers, of the editors, of information’s watchdogs. Now that mass production and mass distribution have been made irrelevant, information consumers must recognize the work that goes into conceptual production and distribution. By this, I mean appreciating an author’s ability to produce high-quality, factual, well-researched (produced) work in a well-written manner that can be easily understood by (and therefore distributed to) a wide audience.

Journalists need to be able to make a living off of providing privileged information. Advertising revenue and (unpopular) subscription fees alone may not be enough to keep journalism as we know it afloat online.

As the generation of 1960‘s college students who invented the Internet eventually dies out and is replaced by those who take the Internet for granted – our generation – it is vital that we move in a new direction when it comes to placing value on information.

Complete freedom of information may seem like a eutopia, but it may eventually lead to a dystopia – an information dark age.