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Information Wants to Be Free . . . Again

5/4/2005

By Terry Calhoun

Second, we’ve probably increased the throughput of certain kinds of incoming information, but at the same time our culture and technology have placed many of us in an environment which is quite different from the ones that our ancestors lived in. That old truism (which may not be true, although it serves the purpose here) about the Inuit having so many words for “snow” actually points to the fact that the more people pay attention to something in their environment, the more they find there is to it. Kind of like where we’ve gone with science in the past couple hundred years.

Third, we--or rather our culture-–train ourselves to not recognize or see certain kinds of information. Even to actively avoid it. Take the common practice in crowded elevators of everyone facing the front while they travel up or down. We’re looking at a stainless steel wall instead of at maybe 15 other human beings, with all their different faces, hairstyles, clothing, and accouterments. Many of us have even let television or movie stars replace, for purposes of gossip and caring, the kinds of relatives and neighbors who would have filled those roles for us even only 100 years ago. Since what all those stars do is pretty intensely scripted, it’s like living in a gossip monoculture equivalent to 1,000 square miles of the same specific subspecies of wheat.

For example, in the last two years I’ve built myself a private disc golf course on the nearly 10 acres of land where I live, and included a half-mile walking path, etc. When I walk that path in June, I may notice a few beautiful wildflowers, and maybe a deer hoof print or two. My eyes and ears and nose probably do take in a whole lot more data than I recognize or can use as information--but that would not have been true of the humans who lived on this piece of land 500 years ago. They would have been paying closer attention to everything and, thus, taking in far more information than I do.

One of those people would have recognized hundreds of different plants, as well as their properties and uses and edibility. She would have been able to tell what kinds of animals had been where, and how often from prints and trails I simply do not see. She would have heard rabbits and the smaller creatures, even three-inch long voles traveling several inches under bent grass. I bet that if we could measure it, her brain was probably processing, storing, and using as much information as ours do, just different kinds and for different purposes.

How d'es information wanting to be free come into this? Well, there are two kinds of "free" pertinent to information. One means "no cost" and the other means "unrestrained." Of course, our modern society d'es its best to restrain valuable information in order to buy and sell it.

I like to think of our current situation as an aberration. Throughout most of human experience (with definite exceptions!) information has indeed been free, whatever was out there was unrestrained and no one was selling access to it. One might be able to think of current-day "fettered" information as "yearning to be free." In fact, whether or not information is "valuable" depends on whether or not the person who needs it has it at the right time. So there is a part of me that yearns to start a "Free Information" movement, complete with bumper stickers and email campaigns.

But I won’t. I have confidence that our future, despite the legal machinations, driven by economical concerns, will contain more than enough interesting, useful, and valuable information to satisfy my wants-–and far more than my storage and throughput can handle. Even if I have to stay up late and read that second book of the night to satisfy that information input craving.

1 As I used to remind my children (gross-out factor) when they were smaller, the olfactory sense is based on a system where very tiny particles of a substance float up into your nose and land at an olfactory receptor, which then sends information to your brain, which interprets that into a smell. In kid language that means that “Whenever you smell something, that means a little tiny piece of it is stuck up inside your nose.”

About the author: Terry Calhoun is Director of Communications and Publications for the Society for College and University Planning (SCUP). You can contact him through CT's IT Trends forum by clicking here. View more articles by Terry Calhoun.

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