“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”!

Comments

  1. KumarNovember 14, 2010 at 7:08 PM

    What Brand said a quarter of a century back is still true, probably truer!

    We 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.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Student of the Year

Image
As a toddler, my daughter loved Alia Bhatt’s songs, esp. the ones from Student of the Year . (That movie did have many good songs and well-choreographed dances). Fast forward to present day, when she is 12 yo. She rarely watches Hindi movies now, but one of the few ones she likes of late, Raja aur Rani ki Prem Kahani has, yes, Alia Bhatt.   If I had any hopes that there was anything to be read in the name of her toddler-time favorite ( Student of the Year ), they have been dashed. Our conversations come exam time are perfectly captured by this photo and its caption: In fact, the pic below captures how she and I look at her answer sheets – me intently, she with an expression of “It’s over, so why are you even looking at it?”   Of late, we pull her leg and tell her that she isn’t showing any signs of academic prowess, she’d better find a rich guy to marry. Some time later, she showed us this meme on the Internet: “Me No Study, Me No Care Me Go Marry Millionaire If He Die
Read more

Animal Senses #7: Touch and Remote Touch

Instinctively, we think touch is based on contact. Not entirely true, explains Ed Yong in Immense World – there’s a more important aspect than contact: “These incredible feats are possible through movement. If you rest a fingertip upon a surface, you can get only a limited idea of its features. But as soon you’re allowed to move, everything changes. Hardness becomes apparent with a press. Textures resolve at a stroke.” As you run your fingers over a surface, they hit the tiny peaks and troughs and set off vibrations in the mechanoreceptors at their tips.   At the tip of its snout, the star-nosed mole has many pairs of hairless appendages. It uses them to touch things around itself. Alive or dead? Food or ignore? It does these movements at an insane speed. In the time it takes to blink our eyes, the star-nosed mole can probe, identify and swallow its food. “Light may be the fastest thing in the universe, but light sensors have their limits, and the star-nosed mole’s sense of
Read more

The Retort of the "Luxury Person"

Image
Coming up with biting and witty retorts. It’s something we dream of, but rarely manage to pull off. Worse, the more we stew over the offending remark, the more likely we are to come up with that dream retort, as Calvin ruefully points out: During our last holiday at the Taj Resort, seeing my wife carrying towels to our poolside chairs, one of the kids there mistook her for a member of the staff and asked for a towel. When my wife narrated this to us, I did not imagine that my 8 yo daughter would come up with her own retort. But a day later, my daughter recapped the incident, an incident that didn’t even involve her in the first place , and said, “You know what I’d have told that kid who asked for the towel?”. And without waiting for an answer, she told us anyway: “I don’t work here. I too am a luxury person who is living at this resort. Go get your own towel.” We were highly amused by the phrase she had coined: “luxury person”. It certainly captures the kind of holid
Read more