The jacket flap on Weinberger's book says,
Information is most valuable when it is thrown into a big digital "pile" to be filtered and organized by users themselves.
Instead of relying on experts, groups of passionate users are inventing their own ways of discovering what they know and want.
Smart companies do not treat information as an asset to be guarded, but let it loose to be "mashed up," gaining market awareness and customer loyalty.
And that is why I am a slave. Companies are letting me do all the work for free while they increase market share by becoming more visible.
It's like when kids started wearing t-shirts with company logos on them, and I'd ask if the company paid them to wear and advertise their product, and the kid said, no, I just like the shirt. It didn't seem like a big deal, but it's evolved into another aspect of them against us. The corporations slowly conditioned us to accept our role. Sure, they might pay a celebrity to wear a corporate logo, but millions of us do it for free.
The companies own the tools and trademarks, but say, look how cool this is, and then we play, and they get rich.
This is not some paranoid conspiracy. This is just the truth. And there is nothing anyone can do about it.
Facebook was just valued at 15 billion dollars. Why? Because people use it. And people populate the site with personal data. There is the value. But how do the users share in those billions? The billions that couldn't exist without them? Do the billions in any way relate to the utility? Is Facebook a better product today than it was last year? Search engines are the same way. If Google is worth 185 billion, again, most of that is from current and future revenue based on people using the search engine and viewing ads, the shareholders gain from that; but what of the users. You could argue that the quality of the product is the benefit to the users, but is that really a satisfactory answer? The Internet exists with or without Facebook or Google and the other search tools. I don't need a search tool to find eBay or Overstock; I saw the ads on TV.
As librarians, as experts in information retrieval, I can see why everyone thinks we are unnecessary, that they can make sense of this disorderly "digital pile" of data themselves. Disorder is just as natural as order, so most people think order is just as easy as disorder. But the Internet is like a game of 52 Pick-Up; it's like a thousand games of 52 Pick-Up. Disorder is too easy. One of the ideas from the book seems to be that from this seeming disorder, will come order. And I don't doubt that. But I have little faith that any of us will see the same benefits that the information holders will.
The new world of digital data has no logical place with no definite location. Is this information? People are free to tag this data however they wish, without experts restricting how the data are categorized. But people are lazy. A search for DSCF0001, a generic identifier for a digital picture, turns up over 150,000 items. So people are not renaming their digital photos with any significant file names. How many more people are tagging their photos with "fun" or "omfg"? And that doesn't account for all those who can't spell. And even with a free spellchecker such as the one built in to this text editor, I let misspellings slip.
One part of that video shows the line, "together we created more information than the experts." But do we own it? Without the search tools, will you ever be able to find it? Information has become a true commodity, and the value of that commodity, unlike traditional commodities, relies on it being endless. Information is no longer just valuable because only a few people know it, but also because many access it. What are we paid for this labor?
I'm not saying this for nothing; people need experts. If there is no future for librarians, will I become some kind of techno-terrorist raiding the world's information archives? "Information needs to be free," we will cry, "and if it will not be free, we will destroy it." I think there's a novel in there somewhere.
I haven't read that book, yet, but I wanted to get some of my ideas out so I wouldn't forget them. And anyway, this is a blog with no pretense at being anything except my own crazy thoughts. You don't come here for enlightenment; you can go pretty much anywhere else for that. You come here because you thank God you're not me. And you come here for the pie.
