mandag 19. april 2010

INFORMATION WANTS TO BE FREE….


Once again I was thinking about McLuhan; ”Information wants to be free”.
I started to look into the average spending on information, the infrastructure of the minds. It was hard to find something about this on norwegian issues, but found some articles about it in New York Times, which, even though its american figures, can still provide us with some background material. It used to be that a basic $300-a-year phone bill was your main telecommunications expense and some postal stamps where the cost for your written communication. But by 2004, the average American spent $770.95 annually on services like cable television, Internet connectivity and video games, according to data from the Census Bureau. By 2008, that number rose to $903, outstripping inflation. By the end of this year, it is expected to have grown to $997.07. Add another $1,000 or more for cellphone service and the average family is spending as much on entertainment over devices as they are on dining out or buying gasoline. And these figures do not take into account movies, music and television shows bought through iTunes, or the data plans that are increasingly mandatory for more sophisticated smartphones. This means that there will be a gap between the ones who are willing and able to pay for this access and those who want.
Even though we think we have now reached the information society, its not like that for everyone, the costs to keep the information free are for some quite an obstacle.
What we realy pay for now is not free information, we pay for CONTENT, and the abbility to get ACCESS to this content. If we look at the data available to us we will see that we pay alot to gett he ACCESS, but, we pay a very small sum for the available CONTENT.
The reason we pay less for content is simple: There is more content available than there is time to consume it.

3 kommentarer:

  1. yes... and the content is so huge that we spend (waste) lots of time searching and finding nothing. Access to information becomes the opposite.

    SvarSlett
  2. New data shows that on the worldwideweb 17 billion web pages of content is out there.This includes both the accasable pages and the content within these, the subdivision of content. Research shows that the known Internet - the Internet excluding the Deep Web is growing by more than 10,000,000 new, static pages each day. In contrast, the fastest growing search engine database is increasing at about 10% of this pace.

    http://www.metamend.com/internet-growth.html

    SvarSlett
  3. ...and what information do we finally find and how do we relate to it? (What is true?) We tend to find what we want to find... if I want to I can find information supporting the non-existence of Holocaust.

    SvarSlett