Information Is an
Activity
by John Perry Barlow
Information Is a Verb, Not a Noun
Freed of its containers, information is
obviously not a thing. In fact, it is something that happens in the field of interaction
between minds or objects or other pieces of information. |
| Gregory Bateson, expanding on the information theory of
Claude Shannon, said, "Information is a difference which makes a difference."
The making of that difference is an activity within a relationship. Information is an
action which occupies time rather than a state of being which occupies physical space, as
is the case with hard goods. It is the pitch, not the baseball, the dance, not the dancer. |
Information Is Experienced, Not Possessed
Even when it has been encapsulated in some static form like a book or a hard disk,
information is still something that happens to you as you mentally decompress it from its
storage code. But, whether it's running at gigabits per second or words per minute, the
actual decoding is a process that must be performed by and upon a mind, a process that
must take place in time.There was a cartoon in
the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists a few years ago that illustrated this point
beautifully. In the drawing, a holdup man trains his gun on the sort of bespectacled
fellow you'd figure might have a lot of information stored in his head. "Quick,"
orders the bandit, "give me all your ideas." |
Information is the
pitch, not the baseball, the dance, not the dancer
|
|
Information Has to Move
Sharks are said to die of suffocation if they stop
swimming, and the same is nearly true of information. Information that isn't moving ceases
to exist as anything but potential ... at least until it is allowed to move again. For
this reason, the practice of information hoarding, common in
bureaucracies, is an especially wrong-headed artifact of physically-based value systems. |
Information Is Conveyed by Propagation, Not Distribution
The way in which information spreads is also very
different from the distribution of physical goods. It moves more like something from
nature than from a factory. It can concatenate like falling dominos or grow in the usual
fractal lattice, like frost spreading on a window, but it cannot be shipped around like
widgets, except to the extent that it can be contained in them. It doesn't simply move on;
it leaves a trail everywhere it's been. The
central economic distinction between information and physical property is that information
can be transferred without leaving the possession of the original owner. If I sell you my
horse, I can't ride him after that. If I sell you what I know, we both know it.
excerpt from "The Economy of Ideas"
in WIRED 2.03
by John Perry Barlow
co-founder and executive chair
Electronic Frontier Foundation |
 |
Have you ever worked in an organization whose
marketing was hampered by the information-hoarding upper management? Change the names to
protect the guilty, and tell the story here. |
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