Information Roles and Informationology: A New Approach to

Understanding the Nature and Effects of Digital Information

Maury Shenk

Abstract

This article proposes a new analytic framework for understanding how digital information
influences society. The framework lies at the boundary of sociology and epistemology, and
involves articulation and analysis of different roles that information can play, or
“information roles”. Information roles are defined based upon the nature of the information
medium rather than the specific content of information, drawing on the approach of
Marshall McLuhan in Understanding Media that “the medium is the message”. The article
sets out an initial list of information roles – memory, communication, intellectual property,
market enabler and context – and considers how they can be applied to improve decision-
making by both policy makers and economic actors in our society dominated by digital
information.
 Information Roles: A New Approach to
Understanding the Nature and Effects of Digital Information

Maury Shenk 1

In the information age, you don't teach philosophy as they did after
feudalism. You perform it. If Aristotle were alive today he'd have a
talk show.
-- Timothy Leary 2

In a culture like ours, long accustomed to splitting and dividing all

things as a means of control, it is sometimes a bit of a shock to be
reminded that, in operational and practical fact, the medium is the
message.
-- Marshall McLuhan 3

This article proposes a new approach to understanding the role of information in our
society – an approach suited to the needs of the information age, including the challenges
presented by the ongoing explosion of the volume of the digital information and rapid
evolution of the means by which it is communicated. In simple terms, this article suggests
that even though most of us believe that we know what we mean in the many contexts in
which we use the term “information”, in fact more precision is needed. I propose to provide
this precision by defining a new framework of “information roles”.

The creation of a new framework of “information roles” is a rather ambitious

enterprise, and I have even been so bold as to suggest that it could be a new field of study
called “informationology”. 4 I begin this challenging task with three examples, each related to
a “secret”.

1Maury Shenk pursues innovation-related ventures and activities in the technology sector through his
company Lily Innovation Advisors (http://www.lily-innovation.net). Maury is a lawyer by training
and is an advisor to global law firm Steptoe & Johnson, where he has spent much of his career and was
formerly London managing partner. He is a graduate of Harvard College and Stanford Law School.
2“Timothy Leary,” Wikiquote, http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Timothy_Leary (sourcing quote to
Charles McGuire and Diana Abitz, The Best Advice Ever for Teachers, p. 57 (2001)).
3 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, p. 6 (1964: Routledge ed. 2008).
4Many of the ideas in this article were articulated by the author in “Informationology: A New
Framework for Understanding the Roles of Digital Information,” published in the October 2009 issue
of the Privacy & Data Security Law Journal.

2
The “Real Thing”, the Financier and the Schoolgirl

The first example involves a secret that has been kept for more than 120 years, and
remains one. Coca-Cola (called the “Real Thing” in a long-running advertising campaign
begun in 1969) is made using a formula developed in 1886 by Dr John Pemberton and
jealously guarded ever since. 5 Despite its commercial importance, the Coca-Cola formula is
a rather straightforward secret. The questions that it raises are simple ones like “What is it?”
and “How have the folks at Coke managed to protect it so well?”
The second example is a secret that was kept for 20 years or so, but was recently
broken. As is now widely known, Bernard Madoff committed the biggest financial fraud in
history by running a “Ponzi scheme” from the 1980s until its discovery in late 2008, with an
ultimate loss to investors of around $65 billion. 6 Madoff claimed to be investing funds in an
equity and options trading scheme that generated predictable but impressive returns over a
period of many years, but in fact he was doing no such thing. The questions surrounding the
Madoff affair are more complex than those about Coca-Cola. We must ask how this
happened and how it can be kept from happening again, because without assurance that
such behavior is not widespread, securities markets would not be able to function effectively.
The third example does not involve an actual secret, but rather personal information
that became much more widely known (or less personal and secret) than expected. Georgina
Hobday is a 16-year-old schoolgirl in England. She recently had her first 15 minutes of fame
(with more likely to come) by inviting about 100 friends to her 16th birthday party using her
Facebook page, which also displayed some sultry pictures of Georgina, who is a remarkably
beautiful girl. There were at least two unanticipated results of the invitation. First, 500
uninvited guests from the self-styled Facebook Republican Army (“FRA”) crashed Georgina’s
party, doing significant damage to her family home despite intervention by adult chaperones
and the police. Second, the Storm modeling agency (which represents supermodels Kate
Moss and Elle Macpherson among others) learned about Georgina from the events and
offered her a modeling contract. All of this was widely reported in the English press.
The “secret” information in these three examples is of a widely varying nature, and not
primarily because the content of the information is different. Coca-Cola’s secret is about the
content of its formula, but probably more than that it is about the massive business built

5 See Coca-Cola History, Coca-Cola Heritage Timeline, http://heritage.coca-cola.com; Coca-Cola

slogans, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coca-Cola_slogans. Coca-Cola claims that the formula has not
changed during its 123 years in existence, other than the unsuccessful effort to introduce New Coke in
1985.
6See “Con of the century,” The Economist (Dec. 18, 2008); “Going down quietly,” The Economist (Mar.
12, 2009). Madoff’s scheme was to a limited extent an “open secret”, because various interested
observers had suggested for years that Madoff’s performance was impossible. However, these
warnings were not widely heard.

3
around the formula and the mystique of the formula’s secrecy as an element of the Coca-Cola
brand. In fact, a competitor with access to the Coca-Cola formula would probably be unable
to make a significant dent in Coca-Cola’s global franchise. The importance of Bernard
Madoff’s secret is even further removed from its specific content. More important than the
specific details of what he was actually doing (i.e. not investing at all, and spending his
clients’ money in ways that have yet to be determined) is the fact that he was not doing what
he claimed to be doing – the most costly ever single failure of transparency in financial
markets, which depend upon dissemination of information to function. By contrast,
Georgina Hobday’s not-so-secret Facebook profile is of interest precisely because of the
personal information that it contains, both the actual content of the information (e.g. her
photographs and details of her birthday party plans) and its privacy dimensions (e.g. the
nature or lack of technological controls on access to the information, and the associated
social and legal constraints).

The Medium is the Message

The point of the preceding examples is that the differences among the three secrets
involve much more than their content. Likewise, the framework of information roles seeks
to identify the different means by which digital information influences our society,
independent of the content of specific information.
In 1964, Marshall McLuhan observed in Understanding Media that “the medium is the
message” – i.e. that the nature of a communication medium (or another medium that
extends human capabilities, such as electric light or powered transportation) is the crucial
factor that determines its effect, entirely independent of the content transmitted by the
medium. McLuhan predicted the huge impact of digital technology:
Our electric extensions of ourselves [i.e. digital processing of information]
simply by-pass space and time, and create problems of human involvement for
which there is no precedent. We may yet yearn for the simple days of the
automobile and the superhighway. 7
McLuhan was right, but even he could not foresee the detailed impact of digital information.
In the nearly half century since McLuhan’s prescient words, digital technology has made
astounding advances that were simply inconceivable at the time he wrote. Now that the
information age is perhaps entering adolescence, we can see that digital information is not a
single, unitary medium, but rather one that has diverse and distinguishable effects. It is the

7Understanding Media, p. 114. The cover notes of the 2008 Routledge edition of Understanding
Media observes: “McLuhan’s insights into our engagement with a variety of media led [him to] to a
complete rethinking of our entire society. He believed that the message of electronic media foretold
the end of humanity as it was known. In 1964, this looked like the paranoid babblings of a madman.
In our twenty-first-century digital world, the madman looks quite sane.”

4
goal of this article to examine these different strands of the digital medium through the lens
of information roles.
Many authors have observed the significant and varied effects of the digital medium.
Manuel Castells is a leading example, with his explorations of the “network society”. In The
Internet Galaxy, Castells writes:
The Internet Galaxy is a new communication environment. Because
communication is the essence of human activity, all domains of social life are
being modified by the pervasive uses of the Internet … . A new social form, the
network society, is being constituted around the planet, albeit in a diversity of
shapes, and with considerable differences in its consequences for people’s lives,
depending on history, culture and institutions. 8
Along similar lines, Erik Davis writes in TechGnosis that “our cultural and psychic lives
increasingly reflect the patterns and temporal signatures of this machine world and its
expanding networks.” 9
The social effects of digital technologies are also the focus of John Seely Brown and
Paul Duguid in The Social Life of Information, but with emphasis on the linkages to
traditional elements of society:
Living in the information age can occasionally feel like being driven by
someone with tunnel vision. This unfortunate disability cuts off the peripheral
visual field, allowing sufferers to see where they want to go, but little besides. …
[O]ur sense of the neglected periphery is not limited to the visual periphery of
physical objects. It also embraces what we think of as the social periphery, the
communities, organizations, and institutions that frame human activities. …
We [make] prognostications about, for example, the world of information,
digital agents, the home office, the paperless society, the virtual firm, and the
digital university. … [W]e try to explain why so many confident predictions
remain just that, predictions. Too often, we conclude, the light at the end of an
information tunnel is merely the gleam in a visionary’s eye. The way forward
is to look not ahead, but to look around. 10
Despite such explorations of the information society, relatively little has been done to
develop McLuhan’s analysis of the nature of the digital medium itself. McLuhan lamented
“[j]ust how little consideration has been given to such matters in the past” 11 – but most of the
Internet generation seems to have missed the point. Fortunately, there are exceptions,
particularly in creative industries. For example, Kevin Roberts, CEO of advertising and ideas

8Manuel Castells, The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business and Society, p. 275
(2001: Oxford University Press ed. 2002); see also Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society,
vol. 1 of The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, p. 469 (1996: Blackwell).
9 Erik Davis, TechGnosis, p. 328 (1998: Serpent’s Tail ed. 1999).

John Seely Brown & Paul Duguid, The Social Life of Information, pp. 1, 5, 7-8 (2000: Harvard
10

Business School Press).

11 Understanding Media, p. 4.

5
company Saatchi & Saatchi, wrote in a recent book about the effects of pervasive video
screens:
New ideas need new words. sisomo is a new word for something so familiar we
take it for granted. Sight, Sound and Motion on screen. 12
Like McLuhan, Roberts recognizes that the screen as a medium has identifiable effects that
are independent of the specific content that appears on screen. But, unfortunately, such
insights tend to be isolated and focused. We still lack a more general framework for
understanding and distinguishing the different influences of the digital medium on society.

Defining “Information Roles”

Questions about what we know and how we know it have been debated for 2500 years,
since the ancient Greeks created epistemology, the branch of philosophy that addresses such
questions. For example, in the “Allegory of the Cave”, Plato imagined a group of prisoners in
chains whose reality is limited to shadows cast on the wall of the cave. 13 When freed from his
chains a prisoner can see the forms that are casting the shadows, and if he leaves the cave the
prisoner can see the real world – but it will take him some time to understand whether
reality lies in the shadows, the objects that cast them, or the “real” world itself. This
allegorical story is intended to help us understand the nature of our knowledge of reality.
Just as epistemology considers the fundamental nature of knowledge, the primary question
addressed in this article is not the content of digital information, but its fundamental nature
as a medium.
There is an extensive modern literature on the meaning of the words “information” and
“knowledge”, although these definitional efforts are often only a peripheral aspect of broader
discourse. For example, in his three-volume magnum opus The Information Age: Economy,
Society and Culture, Castells uses only a footnote in his prologue “[f]or the sake of clarity in
th[e] book … to provide a definition of knowledge and information …”, drawing on the work
of others:
I have no compelling reason to improve on Daniel Bell’s own definition of
knowledge: “Knowledge: a set of organized statements of facts or ideas,
presenting a reasoned judgment or an experimental result, which is
transmitted to others through some communication medium in some systematic
form. Thus, I distinguish knowledge from news and entertainment.” As for
information, some established authors in the field, such as Machlup, simply
define information as the communication of knowledge. However, this is
because Machlup’s definition of knowledge seems to be excessively broad, as

12 Kevin Roberts, sisomo, p. 16 (2005: powerHouse Books).

13 The Allegory of the Cave, which is written as a dialogue between Socrates (Plato’s teacher) and

Glaucon (Plato’s brother), addresses questions of both metaphysics (i.e. the philosophy of
fundamental questions of existence) and epistemology.

6
 Bell argues. Thus, I would rejoin the operational definition of information
proposed by Porat in his classic work: “Information is data that have been
organized and communicated.” 14
Brown and Duguid distinguish “knowledge” from “information” by observing that
“knowledge usually requires a knower”, to whom it attaches through substantial effort, while
information is more abstract in nature. 15
The most detailed critical examination of “information” has been in the field of
information science. For example, in The Mathematical Theory of Communication, Claude
Shannon (with commentary by Warren Weaver) sets out a brilliant and fundamental
mathematical analysis of the communication of information. Weaver points out that for the
purposes of this theory “information must not be confused with meaning” 16 :
An [information] engineering communication theory is just like a very proper
and discreet girl accepting your telegram. She pays no attention to the
meaning, whether it be sad, or joyous, or embarrassing. But she must be
prepared to deal with all that come to her desk. This idea that a communication
system ought to try to base design on the statistical character of the source, is
surely not without significance for communication in general. Language must
be designed (or developed) with a view to the totality of things that man may
wish to say; but not being able to accomplish everything, it too should do as
well as possible as often as possible. That is to say, it too should deal with its
task statistically. 17
Although other strands of information science take a much closer look at “meaning”, the
discipline overall provides little guidance for considering the specific social impacts of
information. Ronald Day recognizes this in The Modern Invention of Information, where he
considers the ideas of Shannon and Weaver and other key developments of 20th century
information science:
The term “information” often plays the role of a reified token in various
ideological language games; such questions as, “Why is it important to ‘have’
information?,” “What does it mean to be ‘information literate’?,” “What is the
nature of the ‘information society’?,” or even “What are the specific
characteristics of ‘information technologies’?” are rarely, in any fundamental
way, asked, at least with any social, political, and historical depth. …
What is at stake here is not only the social production of a professional or
scholarly field such as “information science” but ideological limitations upon
concepts, vocabulary, and other practical tools for analyzing the cultural

Manuel Castells, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, Volume 1: The Rise of the
14

Network Society, p. 17 n. 27 (1996: Blackwell).

15 The Social Life of Information, pp. 119-20.

Claude E. Shannon & Warren Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication, p. 8 (1949:
16

University of Illinois Press ed. 1975).

17 The Mathematical Theory of Communication, p. 27.

7
 reality or nature of information and of the information society that we are
repeatedly told that we are socially in and historically moving toward. 18
Simply put, the central and multi-faceted roles of information in our 21st century
society indicate that it is not sufficient to consider “information” in general. As Day says, we
require “concepts, vocabulary, and other practical tools for analyzing the cultural reality or
nature of information”. To help satisfy this need, the present article suggests a framework
for understanding the various different roles that information can play, or “information
roles”.
My ambitious hope is that by defining and understanding information roles, we can
improve decision-making by both policy makers and economic actors (companies,
individuals and others) in our society dominated by digital information. That is, the
framework of information roles lies at the heavily-guarded frontier between sociology and
epistemology, and adjacent to the domains of information science and philosophy of science.
Perhaps counter-intuitively, in our information society, a practical philosophy appears more
relevant than ever to help us decide where we should be going.
It is worth examining this point more closely – i.e. whether it is appropriate to apply a
philosophical lens to questions about digital information. Epistemology in its classical sense
addresses rather abstract issues, while information roles offer a practical framework for
understanding how digital information influences society. Brown and Duguid wrote in The
Social Life of Information about this tension between abstract and practical epistemology in
the course of considering “knowledge management”:
On the one hand, epistemology, the theory of knowledge, has formed the
centerpiece of heavyweight philosophical arguments for millennia. On the
other, knowledge management has many aspects of another lightweight fad. …
We may then, be trying to lift a gun too heavy to handle to aim at a target too
insubstantial to matter. 19
While this is a fair challenge, on reflection it is clearly safe to use epistemology to
consider information age issues that are far less abstract than the questions considered by
Plato. 20 A rough rationale for this choice can be found Timothy Leary quotation that begins
this article, “In the information age, you don’t teach philosophy … . You perform it.” A more

18 Ronald Day, The Modern Invention of Information: Discourse, History, and Power, pp. 115-17

(2001: Southern Illinois University Press).

19 The Social Life of Information, p. 118.
20Other authors have begun to explore to explore the questions of epistemology presented by the
information age, but the literature on the topic remains nascent. See, e.g., Paul Thagard, “Internet
Epistemology: Contributions of New Information Technologies to Scientific Research,” unpublished
manuscript, University of Waterloo (1997), available at http://cogprints.org/674/; Birger Hjørland,
“Information Science, Epistemology and the Knowledge Society,” invited speech, INFO 2008 (Cuba,
April 2008), available at http://dlist.sir.arizona.edu/2304/.

8
reasoned explanation of the interaction of abstract philosophy and practical science is
offered by E.O. Wilson in Consilience:
[It has been] argued that philosophy in fact addresses just two issues: the
questions that the sciences – physical, biological, and social – cannot answer,
and the reasons for that incapacity. … [H]owever, the obvious fact [is] that
scientists are equally qualified to judge what remains to be discovered and why.
There has never been a better time for collaboration between scientists and
philosophers … . We are approaching a new age of synthesis, when the testing
of consilience [i.e. unity of knowledge] is the greatest of all intellectual
challenges. Philosophy, the contemplation of the unknown, is a shrinking
dominion. We have the common goal of turning as much philosophy as possible
into science. 21
That is, science and philosophy are brothers in arms, and must ultimately merge into each
other.
On these premises, I will consider five possible information roles:
 memory – information as a record of accumulated knowledge;
 communication – information as a means of social interaction;
 intellectual property – information with legally-defined ownership interests;
 market enabler – information that permits efficient markets to function; and
 context – information regarding the location, time or environment in which actions
take place.
This list is only a starting point, and far from an exhaustive enumeration of possible
information roles. There are substantial overlaps among these five roles, suggesting that
more precise definitions are needed. But by putting flesh on the bones of this initial list,
which is the task of most of the rest of this article, it is possible to illustrate the intellectual
and practical potential offered by the study of information roles.

Information as Memory: The Digital Tsunami

The most obvious information role is probably that of knowledge about our world and
universe. Such knowledge can take many forms, including:
 scientific knowledge with practical application – e.g. a map of the human genome;
 “pure” scientific knowledge, which may be unlikely to find practical application in
the near future – e.g. photographs of distant galaxies taken by the Hubble Space
Telescope;

21 Edward O. Wilson, Consilience, p. 10 (1998: Abacus ed. 2008). Wilson’s goal in Consilience is to

suggest that there is a “unity of knowledge.” Although this enterprise on its face may seem
inconsistent with the goal of defining distinct information roles, I see no true inconsistency. Quite
simply, defining knowledge as unified does not mean that it is perfectly homogenous.

9
  details of our current physical environment – e.g. meteorological data, or
photographic data on Google Earth;
 historical information with a public dimension – e.g. global temperatures over the
past 100 years, or what happened in the War of the Roses; and
 historical information of a personal nature – e.g. Maury Shenk’s grades in high
school, or a list of the books that he has purchased. 22
A crucial aspect of all of this information is that it can be recorded. Recorded
information, whether in printed or digital form, provides a substitute for human memory
and is perhaps the single most important driver of the growth of civilization. McLuhan
observed that “[t]he achievements of the Western world, it is obvious, are testimony to the
tremendous values of literacy.” 23
But the role of information as memory is changing significantly in the face of a virtual
tsunami of recorded digital information. The rapid growth of Internet traffic and digital
information was first widely recognized over the period of the dot-com boom and subsequent
bust, but in fact this period a decade ago was but a harbinger of much more substantial data
flows that continue to accelerate. Global internet traffic grew by a factor of approximately
75,000 times between 1990 and 2000, and it again grew more than a hundredfold between
2000 and 2008 (i.e. internet traffic volume was about 8 million times as large in 2008 as
1990). 24 These massive and increasing data flows require us to think about information in a
fundamentally new way, including because information in digital form can be much more
easily accessed, stored, transferred and processed than printed information. Although the
flood of bits and bytes on the Internet is still “information”, a few drops of water are different
from a stream, or a river or an ocean. As dialectic philosophers have recognized, quantitative
change eventually produces a turning point of qualitative change, when the rules of the game
change significantly and often suddenly. 25
The digital revolution means that information is far more available than even a few
years ago, but in volumes that are often far too high to be directly reviewed or processed by
individual human beings. As a result, individuals and institutions must take an increasingly
automated and selective approach to information processing, producing great variation in
their ability to use information, and to assess the quality of information that is used. In the

22 As noted in the conclusion, personal information may deserve a separate information role.
23 Understanding Media, p. 92.
24 See, e.g., “Internet Traffic,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_traffic.
25 The leading modern proponent of dialectic philosophy is Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, whose

concept of “Measure” is based on the identity of quantity and quality, and the transformation of one
into the other. See “Dialectic,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectic.

10
corporate world, sophisticated software tools offer “business intelligence” and “predictive
analytics”, but it is far from straightforward to integrate these tools with existing business
models, producing real winners and losers among businesses in their ability to manage and
leverage the information in their corporate “memory”. In The New Age of Innovation, C.K.
Prahalad and M.S. Krishnan observe:
There is a fundamental transformation of business underway. Forged by
digitzation, ubiquitous connectivity, and globalization, this transformation will
radically alter the very nature of the firm and how it creates value. 26
The more general version of this problem is illustrated by a 2008 article from The New
Yorker magazine about a truck driver named John Coster-Mullen, who has devoted years of
free time to researching the construction of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and
Nagasaki in 1945. Paying homage to the relentless pursuit of details about a very specialized
subject, author David Samuels suggests that:
it is hard to imagine what America would look like without the small and
shrinking number of people who engage in painstaking, firsthand research in
order to separate the truth from the body of supposed facts, and who keep the
rest of us honest. A corollary of this insight, of course, is that much of what we
think we know is wrong. 27
In a world immersed by a digital tsunami, there will be an increasing shortage of
people to reliably and consistently “separate the truth from the body of supposed facts”.
Over the long run, true artificial intelligence (“AI”) may substantially relieve the human
burden in analyzing information – replacing current purpose-specific tools like business
intelligence software – but AI appears to be decades away from realizing that promise in a
way that turns the rising tide of information. For the time being, and perhaps counter-
intuitively, the flood of digital information could for some time make us increasingly unsure
about what we really know.

Information as Communication: The Facebook Generation

Another crucial role for information is as an enabler of social interaction, and the effect
of digital technology on this information role is profound. Our social interactions have
always been moderated by spoken and written information, but the speed and ubiquity of
digital communications produce an entirely new effect, as McLuhan recognized:

26C.K. Prahalad & M.S. Krishnan, The New Age of Innovation: Driving Co-Created Value Through
Global Networks, p. 1 (2008: McGraw Hill). See also Tony Fisher, The Data Asset, p. XVI (2009:
Wiley) (“The demand for data quality and data governance to support critical business initiatives is
skyrocketing – and with it the confusion. Executives and shareholders are beginning to realize that
data is a strategic asset … .”).
27 David Samuels, “Atomic John,” The New Yorker (Dec. 15, 2008).

11
 We live today in the Age of Information and Communication because electric
media instantly and constantly create a total field of interacting events in which
all men participate. Now, the world of public interaction has the same inclusive
scope of integral interplay that has hitherto characterized only our private
nervous systems. … The simultaneity of electric communication, also
characteristic of our nervous system, makes each of us present and accessible to
every other person in the world. 28
This personalization of global communications is highly visible in the form of rapidly-
growing social networks like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter, which allow users to create
and share profiles (including photographs and other personal information), join groups,
send personal or group messages, and use an ever-expanding suite of other social
applications. For many of us over the age of 30 who use Facebook, the service provides a
useful way to reconnect with old friends and build relationships with new ones who we have
met offline. But while these older generations do increasingly establish relationships online
(e.g. through Internet dating), there usually remains an intention for linkage to an offline
relationship, and a reasonably clear dividing line between the online and offline spheres.
By contrast, even a quick look at the online activity of those under 25 reveals that
something different is happening. First, online networks are quickly becoming less an
optional tool and more a fundamental fact of life. For example, although the numbers are a
moving target, as of mid-2009 it is clear that in many countries Facebook penetration
substantially exceeds 50% among teenagers and young adults. 29 Second, and related to the
first effect, younger generations fail to draw a clear distinction between online and offline
relationships. These dynamics of social networking for teenagers have been explored at
some length by danah boyd, who writes:
While teenagers primarily leverage social network sites to engage in common
practices, the properties of these sites configured their practices and teens were
forced to contend with the resultant dynamics. Often, in doing so, they
reworked the technology for their purposes. As teenagers learned to navigate
social network sites, they developed potent strategies for managing the
complexities of and social awkwardness incurred by these sites. Their strategies
reveal how new forms of social media are incorporated into everyday life,

28Understanding Media, pp. 269-70. Accessibility to literally “every other person in the world”
remains of course beyond the reach even of the Internet, but in fact such universal connectivity is now
surprisingly close to realization, including through availability of Internet access via satellite at any
point on Earth.
29See, e.g., “Facebook usage – dominated by young audience, despite older demographics growing
quickly,” Nick Burcher blog: Personal Thoughts on the Evolution of Media and Advertising (Mar. 16,
2009), http://www.nickburcher.com/2009/03/facebook-usage-dominated-by-young.html;
“Facebook user numbers by country and Facebook usage by country as percentage of population,”
Nick Burcher blog: Personal Thoughts on the Evolution of Media and Advertising (July 8, 2008),
http://www.nickburcher.com/2008/07/facebook-user-numbers-by-country-and.html.

12
 complicating some practices and reinforcing others. New technologies reshape
public life, but teens’ engagement also reconfigures the technology itself. 30
The Internet revolution also affects forms of communication far more traditional than
social networks. The noted legal scholar Cass Sunstein has suggested that the Internet has
caused spreading of rumours, which is “nearly as old as human history”, to become a much
more dangerous phenomenon:
On the Internet, self-interested and altruistic propagators find it increasingly
easy to spread rumours about prominent people and institutions. Such
rumours cast doubt on their subjects’ honesty, decency, fairness, patriotism,
and sometimes even sanity; often they portray public figures as fundamentally
confused or corrupt. Those who are not in the public sphere are similarly
vulnerable. … The Internet allows damaging information to be provided to the
world in an instant, and it also allows anyone to discover that information in
an instant. 31
And more generally as McLuhan recognized, with the blending of electronic relationships at
a distance into the fabric of daily life,
the globe is no more than a village. …
[E]lectric technology now begins to translate … man back into the tribal and
oral pattern with its seamless web of kinship and interdependence.
The symptoms of this “re-tribalization” of humanity are already widely recognized, for
example by repressive governments that have been unable to enforce strict censorship over
Internet communications, and by content industries (e.g. record companies) that have seem
their business models rapidly undermined by peer-to-peer communications. However, a
broader recognition and understanding of this phenomenon – i.e. that the Internet is not
merely a set of tools but rather a fundamental re-invention of our social interactions – will be
required to predict and act on the challenges and opportunities presented by global digital
communications.

Information as Intellectual Property: The Legacy of Napster

In a world where information is the most valuable commodity, it is inevitable that

information has an important role as property. New, innovative information and ideas
spring from inspiration, hard work or good luck. Once information has been created,
however, it can usually be duplicated at low or zero cost – for example, by telling a story or a
joke, printing a textbook or copying a computer file. This property of information is crucial
to the advance of civilization, since it allows new ideas to be spread around the world and

30danah michele boyd, Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked Politics,
University of California Ph.D dissertation, p. 4 (2008), available at
http://www.danah.org/papers/TakenOutOfContext.pdf.
31 Cass Sunstein, On Rumours, pp. 3, 85 (2009: Allen Lane).

13
into the future. But the ability easily to copy the hard work of the innovator can reduce the
incentive to innovate. To deal with this tension, lawmakers around the world have over time
created a system of property rights in information known as “intellectual property” or “IP”
rights, which permit creators of knowledge to enjoy specific economic benefits.
Some intellectual property rights have existed for centuries. Patent laws – which
provide a monopoly to inventors of new, innovative devices – trace their origin to a 15th
century Venetian statute, and individual patent monopolies have been granted since the
times of ancient Greece. Trademarks, which protect words or symbols that identify a
company or other enterprise, are almost as old. Copyright is somewhat newer, originating
after development of the printing press.
For most of their history, IP rights have been narrowly defined with a fairly limited
impact on society, but they have recently have expanded exponentially in importance. In the
information age, intellectual property is increasingly at the core of value creation in our
global economy. And IP rights themselves have expanded significantly. Copyright initially
protected books, but now extends to music, film, software and other forms of content, and
the duration of protection has also increased significantly. New IP rights continue to be
created, such as plant variety rights (legislated early in the 20th century); semiconductor
mask rights and database rights (created in the last few decades); and rights to domain
names and property in “virtual worlds” (which continue to evolve rapidly). The expanding
importance and scope of IP rights has led to a growing tension between protection of these
rights and the economic and societal benefits that flow from free availability of information.
There is indeed a persuasive argument, made most eloquently by Harvard and Stanford law
professor Lawrence Lessig, that IP rights have expanded well beyond the scope needed to
protect innovation, and primarily benefit specific industrial and corporate interests. 32
In some circumstances it has been possible to avoid most of this tension through
creative use of copyright to ensure that new intellectual property remains in the “commons”
for use by all – playfully known as “copyleft”. Examples include the open source software
movement (enabled by the GNU General Public License and similar software licenses 33 ) and
the Creative Commons project (which addresses a wide variety of artistic and literary

32Lessig’s books addressing this issue include The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a
Connected World (2002: Vintage), Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity (2004:
Penguin) and Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy (2008: Avery
Publishing). Among other things, Lessig has played a central role in the Creative Commons project
and Eldred v. Ashcroft case discussed below.
33 The Free Software Foundation has been central to the development of the GNU General Public

License (“GPL”), and provides information on the GNU GPL and various other open source licenses at
http://www.fsf.org/licensing/.

14
content). 34 But where legacy IP rights have confronted the new reality of Internet
communications, conflict has been inevitable. A striking example has involved peer-to-peer
online exchange of copyrighted music, which has wounded the business model of the global
recording industry with shocking speed and effectiveness.
Until relatively recently, the recording industry (and other copyright owners) enjoyed a
long-term rising tide of power. Early copyright laws – including the English Statute of Anne
of 1710 and the U.S. Copyright Act of 1790 – provided only 28 years of protection, but this
has increased steadily. Most recently in 1998, the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension
Act increased the term of copyright in United States by 20 years, from the life of the author
plus 70 years for work owned by individuals and to 95 years from publication for works
owned by corporate entities – although other countries failed to follow this extension. In
1999, a group of publishers mounted a determined legal challenge to this extension in the
Eldred v. Ashcroft case. They argued that copyright had expanded beyond the limits
permitted by the language of the U.S Constitution that creates the basis for copyright, but the
U.S. Supreme Court rejected their arguments in 2003. 35 However, around the same time
that Eldred was working its way through the courts, the growth of broadband Internet
connectivity and the services that it enables began to rapidly erode the power of content-
based industries – by allowing individual Internet users to circumvent restrictions on
distribution of copyrighted content through peer-to-peer exchange of content in digital form.
Shawn Fanning sowed a bitter harvest for the global recording industry when, as a
student at Northeastern University in Boston in 1999, he created the peer-to-peer music
sharing service Napster. Napster was a free service that allowed its members to share music
files in the popular MP3 format. To facilitate sharing of music files, the company maintained
central servers with lists of the songs made available for sharing by each member. Because
Napster’s server-based services helped its members share copyrighted music for free,
without the permission of copyright owners, the recording industry was able to use legal
pressure to drive it out of business in 2001. 36 But despite its early demise, Napster caused
revolutionary change, including by inspiring a host of other music-sharing services like
Gnutella and BitTorrent that do not use central servers and are therefore much less easy
targets for the lawyers of the recording industry.

34 See http://creativecommons.org/.
35 Eldred v. Ashcroft, 537 U. S. 186 (2003).
36Napster’s assets were purchased out of bankruptcy in 2002 by global media giant Bertelsmann, and
the Napster brand has since reappeared as a legally-compliant music-sharing business (check it out at
http://www.napster.com).

15
 The online music market had been developing for several years before Napster came
along, but it is unlikely that it would have enjoyed its huge recent growth without the
momentum generated by Napster and its progeny. Even after Napster appeared, the
recording industry tried for some time to stick to its traditional strategy of forcing consumers
to buy music on CDs and other recorded media, coupled with an aggressive legal campaign
against online file sharing. Eventually, declining CD sales have forced the recording industry
to agree to broad legal sales of online music – initially mainly through Apple’s iTunes service
and increasingly through other online channels, including ones owned by the record
companies themselves. But despite agreeing to play ball on the Internet, the global recording
industry has been badly wounded – most visibly UK-based EMI Music, which was acquired
by private equity firm Terra Firma in 2007, and since been embroiled in management
turmoil and loss of major performers including Paul McCartney, the Rolling Stones and
Radiohead. Indeed, it is becoming hard to remember the power that the recording industry
had before Napster came along.
The travail of the recording industry in the face of peer-to-peer file sharing is but one
of the titanic conflicts over intellectual property currently taking place. The motion picture
industry is now confronting a similar battle. Another major ongoing conflict involves the
scope of patent protection, including hot debates over such issues as the proper scope of
“business method” patents (e.g. the Amazon.com patent for “1-click” ordering) and the
ability of “patent trolls” (i.e. companies whose main business is patent ownership) to profit
from business activities that infringe their patents. 37 The outcomes of these conflicts are
certain to affect the way in which intellectual property rights are defined and used in the
future.

Information as Market Enabler: The Yellowstone Problem

In and around Yellowstone Park in the western United States, there is an unusual
problem involving bears. To keep bears seeking food out of garbage cans, those living and
working around the park must use extremely durable garbage cans with complex opening
mechanisms – since bears confronting even very clever mechanisms tend to figure them out,
over time. 38 A key challenge is to devise mechanisms that both (1) cannot be opened by any
(or virtually any) bear and (2) can be opened by most adult humans.

37 The most notable “patent troll” dispute resulted in a $612.5 million settlement by BlackBerry maker

Research in Motion in the face of a lawsuit by mobile email patent holder NTP. See, e.g., “BlackBerry
maker, NTP ink $612 million settlement, CNNMoney.com (Mar. 3, 2006),
http://money.cnn.com/2006/03/03/technology/rimm_ntp/.
38 See, e.g., Living With Wildlife Foundation, Bear-Resistant Products Testing Program,

http://www.lwwf.org/Bear-resistant%20products%20testing.htm.

16
 These bear problems have fairly obvious causes, including the huge strength and
relatively high intelligence of bears, as well as the difficulty that some humans experience
with mechanical challenges like opening an unusual garbage can. However, a more subtle
conclusion flows from the observations that (1) both humans and bears around Yellowstone
seek information on how to open garbage cans and (2) such information is secondary to
main activities in which they are in involved (i.e. disposal of trash for humans, and finding
food in a changing ecosystem for bears).
This view of the Yellowstone problem suggests a broader hypothesis about the role of
information as an enabler of efficient markets:
Every primary market is associated with a sub-market for information, and
efficient performance of the primary market depends upon efficient
performance of the information sub-market.
On a sub-market for information, market participants trade information needed to inform
buying and selling decisions on the primary market. This is a crucial and distinct role for
information.
The situation in Yellowstone provides a good illustration of an information sub-market
because it involves two different types of actors dealing with the same resources. But
information sub-markets are everywhere, and are usually more straightforward to observe.
In some cases information sub-markets are quite mature, and function as effectively separate
markets. This is particularly likely where goods, services or intangibles traded on the
primary market are of high value, and the information in question is highly relevant to
assessing the value of the primary market items. For example, securities markets are
associated with highly-developed sub-markets for analysis regarding the expected future
price of the traded securities. But the information sub-market can be clearly observable even
where it is nascent or informal. For example, children around a lemonade stand may
exchange information regarding the taste of the lemonade, or how it is made.
The hypothesis of information sub-markets flows from the “efficient market
hypothesis” – which asserts that market pricing and liquidity reflects all known information
regarding the items being traded – and from the recognition that the efficient market
hypothesis must be qualified where information available to market participants is
constrained. For example, it is widely recognized that market failure can occur where sellers
and buyers have asymmetric information. 39
A “Yellowstone problem” occurs where lack of liquidity or other failure in the
information sub-market leads to or threatens failure of the primary market. In our
Yellowstone example, the desire of humans to disrupt the market for access by bears to food

See, e.g., George A. Akerlof, “The Market for ‘Lemons’: Quality Uncertainty and the Market
39

Mechanism,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics, (Aug. 1970), pp. 488-500.

17
in garbage cans conflicts with the desire to promote an efficient market for disposal of trash.
This is evident from the limits of the solutions to the bear and garbage can problem. For
example, it does not appear that garbage cans with keys or combination locks are a
widespread solution in Yellowstone, presumably in part because garbage collectors also
require access (and a dual- or master-key system would present logistical challenges and
costs). Fortunately, other solutions have been found – so the trash disposal market has
continued to function. In other contexts, however, failure on information sub-markets can
have more devastating consequences.
A recent and economically important manifestation of the Yellowstone problem
involves the trading of complex financial instruments that triggered the recent global
financial crisis. Although there were many causes of the crisis, a significant contributor was
the loss of market liquidity due to the fact that investors had insufficient information to
determine the risk of securities that they held. This information should be knowable with
appropriate effort, but the extent of such effort is so significant (due to the effects of
complexity) as to render the information sub-market illiquid. This is clearly observable in
the ongoing difficulties of leading financial institutions in determining the appropriate price
of the “toxic assets” that they hold. Kenneth Scott and John Taylor of Stanford University
recently observed:
With so much complexity, and uncertainty about future performance, it is not
surprising that the securities are difficult to price and that trading dried up.
Without market prices, valuation on the books of banks is suspect and
counterparties are reluctant to deal with each other. 40
Another illustration of the Yellowstone problem – but without explicit evidence of
market failure – can be drawn from the analysis of complex systems. Complex systems such
as large computer networks exhibit emergent properties (e.g. software “bugs” and security
vulnerabilities) that are extremely difficult to predict and eliminate in the design of the
component parts. The difficulty of eliminating such vulnerabilities stems from information-
related complexities very similar to those producing the Yellowstone problem. While it is
possible in theory to identify the factors causing most vulnerabilities, it is in practice often
prohibitively expensive to do so. So far, the market for the software with such security
vulnerabilities continues to function effectively, and there is no developed market for bug-
free software. But pressures to eliminate security vulnerabilities in software are increasing,
as Internet attacks become more sophisticated and government buyers rely increasingly on
commercial software.

40Kenneth E. Scott & John B. Taylor, “Why Toxic Assets Are So Hard to Clean Up,” The Wall Street
Journal (July 21, 2009), available at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124804469056163533.html.

18
 In our capitalist society, information sub-markets are unavoidable, and their effective
operation is crucial. Capitalism has arguably suffered a set-back from the financial crisis, but
the longer-term story is that capitalism is ascendant, particularly as huge emerging markets
like China and India move decisively towards capitalism. The role of information as market
enabler in this environment is a very important one.

Information as Context: Why Google Maps Is Free

To a casual observer, it may be striking that Google is willing and able to provide so
many services for free, such as Google Maps, Google Earth, YouTube videos, web page
translation and Gmail. However, it is not hard from a business perspective to figure out
what is going on. Google makes the vast majority of its very large income from one business
– Internet advertising 41 – and the central purpose of most of its free businesses is to drive
revenue to its advertising products. Google CEO Eric Schmidt made this point forcefully in a
recent interview:
Free is a better price than cheap. And this simple principle has been lost on
many a business person. There are business models that involve free with
adjacent revenue sources. And, in fact, free is a viable model with branding
[advantages], [charges for] service, and other things. But it’s a different
business model from what most of us are used to. 42
Evidence of which information Google believes is valuable can be obtained by
observing where Google is investing, and an obvious place to look is Google Maps. Google
appears to be spending tens and probably hundreds of millions of dollars to develop content
for Google Maps, for example by photographing city streets around the world for Google
Maps Street View. 43 It is plain why Google thinks that this is money well spent. Location
information is one of the most powerful tools to make advertising content relevant to
consumers (and therefore valuable to advertisers and to Google) through advertisements
related to the place where a consumer is located (as identified by a location technology such
as GPS or by the consumer herself) or a place in which they are interested.

4199% of Google’s 2007 revenue and 97% of its 2008 revenue were from advertising, mostly search-
based advertising, but also display advertising. Google, Inc. 2008 Annual Report (SEC Form 10-K),
Feb. 13, 2009, http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1288776/000119312509029448/d10k.htm.
The material increase in share of non-advertising revenue from 1% in 2007 to 3% in 2008 reflects
Google’s expansion of non-advertising paid services like Google Docs. It remains to be seem whether
such services will ultimately constitute a significant part of Google’s revenue.
42Google’s view on the future of business: An interview with CEO Eric Schmidt, The McKinsey
Quarterly (Sept. 2008), http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Googles_view_on_the_future
_of_business_An_interview_with_CEO_Eric_Schmidt_2229.
43 See http://www.google.co.uk/press/streetview/.

19
 Location data is among the most important types of information in the role of context
– i.e., information regarding the circumstances in which actions take place. Other examples
include time of day, current activity, current attention (e.g. what someone is looking at
online), weather conditions and the identity of other persons present. Context information
has always been highly important to the individual to which it relates. But a crucial change
in the last few years is the development of technologies allowing third parties to efficiently
associate context information with broad segments of the population in real time or near-
real time. For example, the incorporation of inexpensive Global Positioning System (“GPS”)
capabilities into smart phones and other mobile devices means that location data is now
widely available to the operators of networks to which such devices connect, and to third
parties to whom device users choose to transmit location information.
These innovations make information about what individuals are doing at any given
moment more and more available. Perhaps the most important result of availability of such
information is the erosion of individual privacy, which has been the subject of extensive
public discourse and commentary. A particularly insightful commentary that recognizes the
extent of the problem is that of Jonathan Zittrain in The Future of the Internet: And How to
Stop It, who writes:
[T]he Net enables individuals in many cases to compromise privacy more
thoroughly than the government and commercial institutions traditionally
targeted for scrutiny and regulation. The standard approaches that have been
developed to analyse and limit institutional actors do not work well for this new
breed or problem, which goes far beyond the compromise of sensitive
information. 44

Information Roles in Practice

The problem of privacy bring us back to the example of Georgina Hobday, the British
schoolgirl who generated unexpected attention on Facebook. The goal of this article is to
begin to articulate what information roles mean, rather than to apply them to particular
problems. But I offer three brief examples to illustrate how informationology can be applied
in practice and can offer advantages over existing analytic approaches.
The first example relates to privacy issues like those raised by Georgina Hobday’s
Facebook adventures. It involves the insight that personal information is of (at least) two
distinct types – “who I am” (i.e. information as memory) and “what I am doing” (i.e.
information as context). The characteristics of personal information in these two roles are
significantly different. For example, personal information as memory (e.g. a Facebook
profile) is likely to be of more durable interest than personal information as context (e.g.

44 Jonathan Zittrain, The Future of the Internet: And How to Stop It, pp. 200-01 (2008: Penguin).

20
GPS data from my mobile phone), which is primarily relevant near the time of the events to
which it relates. As a result, many individuals may be more comfortable with broad sharing
of their context-related personal information (e.g. to allow nearby businesses to provide
them a personalized service) than sharing of their memory-related personal information.
Nevertheless, personal information as context has the significant privacy dimension that we
may not want our activities to be trackable in real time – indicating that anonymization may
be more important for context-related personal information than for memory-related
personal information. In sum, the preferred modes of sharing for these two types of
personal information might be as illustrated in the following diagram:

Personally-
identifiable
Information
as memory
Personalization

Information
as context

Anonynmous
Confidentiality

Secret Public

Figure 1. Possible Preferences for Sharing Personal Information

Application of such preferences could be an important aspect of designing future privacy

rules – both public rules that governments apply under privacy and data protection law, and
private rules that companies apply in designing reasonable privacy policies for their
customers and others. 45
A second example involves intellectual property law. As discussed above, the rules
regarding intellectual property are highly developed – so it is hardly revolutionary to

45 This analysis relates to information that is voluntarily shared by the person to which it relates. The

dynamics are rather different regarding broad retention of information by or on behalf of law
enforcement authorities, as is now required in Europe under the EU Data Retention Directive
(2006/24/EC) and increasingly in other countries.

21
recognize IP as a separate information role. The more useful insight is that the framework of
property rights created by IP law has become radically disconnected from the original
purpose for the IP information role (i.e. promotion of creativity). As Lawrence Lessig puts
it:
So uncritically do we accept the idea of property in ideas that we don’t even
notice how monstrous it is to deny ideas to a people who are dying without
them [Africans who cannot afford AIDS drugs]. So uncritically do we accept
the idea of property in culture that we don’t even question when the control of
that property removes our ability, as a people, to develop our culture
democratically. 46
That is, we have allowed IP property rights to encroach steadily on information in roles
largely unrelated the IP information role. This is a crucial disconnect in a world that is
increasingly driven by information, and a focus on this disconnect should help inform
thinking on the proper scope of IP rights. Of course, Lessig and others have made this point
clearly without using the framework of information roles – but the close fit of their
arguments with this framework both reinforces their arguments and illustrates the general
utility of information roles.
My third and final example relates to the proper regulatory response to the global
financial crisis. Historical evidence is clear that financial regulation can be effective – U.S.
bank failures practically disappeared between the institution of regulation during the
Depression and de-regulation in the 1980s 47 – but in today’s complex financial markets the
question of where and how to target regulation is a difficult one. Recognition of the
information role of market enabler may point the way to part of the solution. Specifically,
disclosure of risks associated with securities is a key feature of existing law, 48 but these
requirements could be broadened in a targeted way. For example, it may be appropriate to
more strictly regulate credit rating agencies; to design disclosures that facilitate risk
assessment in the huge, interconnected global derivatives markets; and to restrict off-market
transactions in “dark pools of liquidity”. Such enhanced disclosure requirements could be
targeted in areas where they are most likely to reduce risks of market dysfunction, with less
stringent requirements in areas where information does not play a significant market-
enabling role (reducing the costs of “regulation for regulation’s sake”). Of course, better
disclosure is not the only remedy that financial markets need (perhaps the biggest problem
that markets now face is the existence of institutions deemed “too big to fail”), but it could be
an important part of the solution – facilitated by a better understanding of information roles.

46 Free Culture, p. 261.

47 See, e.g., David A. Moss, “An Ounce of Prevention,” Harvard Magazine, p. 25 (Sept. / Oct. 2009).
48E.g. U.S. Securities Act of 1933, 48 Stat. 74, codified at 15 U.S.C. § 77a et seq.; U.S.
Securities Exchange Act of 1934, 48 Stat. 881, codified at 15 U.S.C. § 78a et seq.

22
Conclusion: Changing How We Think About Information

As I noted at the outset, the examples in this article are only an initial articulation of
information roles. It is likely that some or many readers will disagree with the details of
information roles set out above (i.e. memory, communication, intellectual property, market
enabler and context), and there are certainly other roles that I have not explored. 49
But these are points of detail. The central point is that the informationology is useful
and important. As Marshall McLuhan would have put it, there is value to understanding the
message inherent in the information medium itself. At a fundamental level, a better
understanding of information roles can change how we think about information, advance our
knowledge of how our world functions in the age of the Internet, and show where our
knowledge is lacking. As the three examples in the previous section seek to illustrate,
practical benefits of a better understanding of information roles may include supporting
better policy decisions by governments and international organizations; improving business
and investment decisions, and promoting innovation; improving economic efficiency and
avoiding economic turbulence; and protecting privacy and reducing information-enabled
crime.
Informationology does not itself offer answers to the pressing questions facing us in
the information age. Rather, it provides a framework for seeking such answers – a
framework that must be used along with many other tools to help choose courses of action
for our society. These other tools will come from a wide variety of domains, including
technological solutions (both hardware and software), legal rules, public policy initiatives
and “softer” social initiatives. As Timothy Leary might have put it in a version of the

49 Other information roles may include:

 Personal information – This should possibly be a role distinct from memory, communication
and context, which each have linkages to personal information that are noted above. Among
other things, privacy issues give personal information a special dimension.
 Privileged information – We treat some types of information is a special way because of the
nature of the relationship in which it is created and/or shared, such as husband and wife,
lawyer and client, or priest and penitent. A recent exploration of these issues can be found in
Ronald Goldfarb, In Confidence: When to Protect Secrecy and When to Require Disclosure
(2009: Yale University Press).
 Network information – Given the centrality of the network to the digital medium, information
about its functioning is crucial. For example, exchange by users of information regarding the
network could substantially address some of the security challenges now facing the Internet.
See The Future of the Internet, at 162-68.
 Digital waste – Much digital information that is produced, transmitted and stored is largely
unwanted garbage for users who must manage it. Examples include spam email (now
estimated to be nearly 95% of all email – see Brad Stone, “Spam Back to 94% of All E-Mail,” The
New York Times, Bits Blog (Mar. 31, 2009), http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/31/spam-
back-to-94-of-all-e-mail) and the mushrooming contents of corporate data centers (containing
many data stored for fuzzy business or legal reasons, without any real likelihood that they will
ever be accessed).

23
quotation that begins this article, our information age talk shows (at least the serious ones)
should feature the philosophy of information along with more familiar topics of discussion.
It will be a challenging, ambitious and long-term effort to use an understanding of
information roles to make progress in making social choices and achieving the potential
benefits. This vision of applying epistemology – the philosophy of knowledge – to solving
society’s practical problems is a rather utopian vision, but it is not a new one. I return finally
to E.O. Wilson, and his eloquent expression of a similar vision based on ideas first developed
in the Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries:
The legacy of the Enlightenment is the belief that entirely on our own we can
know, and in knowing, understand, and in understanding, choose wisely. That
self-confidence has risen with the exponential growth of scientific knowledge,
which is being woven into an increasingly full explanatory web of cause and
effect. …
In such an endeavor it is not enough to say that history unfolds by processes too
complex for reductionist analysis. That is the white flag of the secular
intellectual, the lazy modernist equivalent of The Will of God. On the other
hand, it is too early to speak seriously of ultimate goals, such as perfect green-
belted cities and robot expeditions to the nearest stars. It is enough to get Homo
sapiens settled down and happy before we wreck the planet. A great deal of
serious thinking is needed to navigate the decades immediately ahead. 50

50 Consilience, pp. 331-32.

24
 Reference List

George A. Akerlof, “The Market for ‘Lemons’: Quality Uncertainty and the Market
Mechanism,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics, (Aug. 1970)
“BlackBerry maker, NTP ink $612 million settlement, CNNMoney.com (Mar. 3, 2006),
http://money.cnn.com/2006/03/03/technology/rimm_ntp/
danah michele boyd, Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked Politics,
University of California Ph.D dissertation (2008), available at
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John Seely Brown & Paul Duguid, The Social Life of Information (2000: Harvard Business
School Press)
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Ronald Day, The Modern Invention of Information: Discourse, History, and Power (2001:
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Eldred v. Ashcroft, 537 U. S. 186 (2003)
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Ronald Goldfarb, In Confidence: When to Protect Secrecy and When to Require Disclosure
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Google, Inc. 2008 Annual Report (SEC Form 10-K), Feb. 13, 2009,
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Quarterly (Sept. 2008), http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Googles_view_on_the_future
_of_business_An_interview_with_CEO_Eric_Schmidt_2229

25
Birger Hjørland, “Information Science, Epistemology and the Knowledge Society,” invited
speech, INFO 2008 (Cuba, April 2008), available at http://dlist.sir.arizona.edu/2304/
“Internet Traffic,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_traffic
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