The little I remember of basic economics was some pretty abstract curves that were supposed to depict supply and demand. Or at least the idea that the real cost of something was at the intersection of supply and demand. The simplistic arches of the curves always bugged me. One of the more annoying features is that attempting to map supply and demand is never as easy as it seems.
Take information. Information is important. Information is a resource. But are we in an age of information scarcity or information abundance? We are taught that information used to be scarce. Information is the basis of knowledge and knowledge is power according to Francis Bacon. We are also taught the simple story of Gutenburg who through certain technological developments revolutionized printing, created the market for cheap books and changed the world forever.
But was information scarce? There weren’t many books but did the market lack books?
Complaints about information overload, usually couched in terms of the overabundance of books, have a long history — reaching back to Ecclesiastes 12:12 (“of making books there is no end,” probably from the 4th or 3d century BC). The ancient moralist Seneca complained that “the abundance of books is distraction” in the 1st century AD, and there have been other info-booms from time to time — the building of the Library of Alexandria in the 3d century BC, or the development of newspapers starting in the 18th century. (Blair, Information Overload: the early years, Boston Globe)
One thing seems to be sure: in the post Gutenburg world the number of books and the number of readers increased. The inventions and business models did not only provide cheaper products but led to an increase in readers. The increased number of readers meant that there was a profitable market for more cheap books. And yet the overriding idea of the scarcity of books remained with us. In 1710 the basis for the first modern copyright legislation The Statute of Anne was to create monopolies to writers so the number of books on the market would increase.
Providing incentives for production is done in times of scarcity. Three hundred years later we have surely moved from scarcity to abundance and yet the only changes to copyright legislation has been to increase the incentives by adding more products the law protects and radically increasing the span of protection.
But we live in a time of information abundance. Information overload. Our impulse is to laugh at Seneca and wonder what he would make of an inbox filled with mail. So maybe its not a problem of overload? Clay Shirky presented at Web 2.0 Expo NY a talk: It’s Not Information Overload. It’s Filter Failure. Or maybe I am mixing things up? Comparing two different things? Is the market for books and information really one market?
Or to make things even more interesting: is there one market for information? I don’t care about the price of a bus ticket in Cleveland, the rise or fall of IBM stock, how to make bricks in Sweden and a million other things. To me all this information may as well be abundant since it is (now) irrelevant. Does this mean that we have a Schroedingers Cat of information? Its both scarce and abundant simultaneously? So information is both scarce and abundant? Then how do you make rules…
Its bad enough that the rules focus not on the information but on the packet that carries it. The form but not the content. In a world were content has become less relevant. However can we regulate a resource that is both scarce and abundant simultaneously?