“Information Wants to be Free”
That’s the statement that sort of summarizes the philosophy of the Internet: “Information wants to be free.”
But that’s a mis-quote! Rather, it’s just a part of what Stewart Brand said more than 25 years back:
“On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.”
Brand’s reaction to the misquote being so popular today that most people don’t even know the actual statements is quite interesting. He says it happens to memes: they propagate in their most efficient form, whether that was what was intended or not.
I suspect that since most people want information to be free (who wants to pay for Britannica when you can get it for free on Wikipedia?), so we’ve just latched onto the part that suits us. Guess you could call it selfish behaviour. Which is kind of poetic when you consider that the word “meme” was coined by Richard Dawkins in his book titled “The Selfish Gene”!
What Brand said a quarter of a century back is still true, probably truer!
ReplyDeleteWe do have easy access for innumerable details. We can surely say, “Thank you instruments, machines, devices and computers”. But some fundamental questions on our own inner world would remain. We need to be at least aware of them, even if we don’t want to address them.
The questions are: Is our ability to view discerningly so much detail functioning well? Is our ability to discriminate between the wanted and unwanted (in the context of the enormity of information) diminishing? Are we by chance losing out on our own keenness to observe and gather from the real world, becoming mechanised receivers of whatever is presented?
‘Meme’, the pragmatic and intelligent word coined by Dawkins, surely applies in this context too. (‘Meme’ means social conditions deeply influencing individuals. The society can thus condition individuals for a long, long time. These could be customs, traditions, religious ideas etc. In other words, behaviour that cannot be explained by genes but appearing to spring from a deep basis, can be understood as ‘meme’ influenced behaviour!) The information age is already influencing our character. Unfortunately, it may reduce both our analytical ability and also our truth-verification tendency. We may not accept it, but if valuable information and information that are of no value - both float around us, all for free, much of real valuable information will not have the importance it would deserve. We won’t know to care, and we can surely blame it on our ‘meme’!
People have the ability to confuse (to be precise ‘not to distinguish’) between these: (1) facts (simple observed detail; for example – something falls), (2) data (better organized details; for example – many things fall), (3) information (something underlying starts surfacing; for example – all things fall), (4) knowledge (intelligent interpretation on general basis; for example – Newton’s law of gravitation), (5) wisdom (universal or core-level understanding; for example – Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity).
I hope people will deal with the vast amount of details floating around, guided by their ability for quality gradations and inner focus.