John Perry Barlow - The Economy of Ideas

When Professor Olsson mentioned John Perry Barlow and some of ideas he talks about in class, it immediately perked my interest. So much so that I've decided to dedicate a post specifically about him. I should stress here that I probably do hold some favorable bias towards him given his position as a digital rights activist and given the fact that he was one of the co-founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Although I won't be focusing too much on his position on intellectual property rights, patents and copyright laws I would like to shed light on how he views information should be understood. Let me, however, begin with a breif outline on his thoughts about the history of intellectual property.

Barlow argues that traditionally property law of all sorts has found its definition in the realm of the physical world. However, with digital technology, information is now becoming detached from the physical plane and the laws of the past are struggling to cope with this phenomenon.

He asserts that when we look at the history of intellectual property law, the thoughts of thinkers that could be capitalized have been focused on the expression of ideas. The ideas themselves, as well as facts about the phenomena of the world, were considered to be the collective property of humanity. For all practical purposes, the value was in the conveyance and not in the thought conveyed.

I find this very interesting as it allows me to think of our primary relationship with information as not our ability to own it (in our minds), but rather our ability to rearrange it into different forms. Information is not to be seen as compartmentalized packets that can be stored by the mind, but as an constantly changing entity of connections that is transformed and rearranged through the vessels of our minds. I think there is a connection here with this way of thinking about information and the question about the relationship between knowledge and meaning. As we process and rearrange information to suit our specific situation and broader context, meaning is assigned to information and is then negotiated in the public sphere (arguably, the whole purpose of this reflective journal is to take information from various sources, re-arrange it in a way that makes meaning to me personally, and then negotiate its meaning publicly).

For now, I would like to focus on Barlow's Perspective when it comes to making sense of what information is. He ascribes three separate properties to Information:

1) Information is an activity

2) Information is a life form

3) Information is a relationship

Information is an Activity

Expanding on the first property, he describes information as something that happens in the field of interaction between minds or objects or other pieces of information. He describes it as an action which occupies time rather than a state of being which occupies physical space (in contrast to Buckland's view of information as an object). In Barlow's words; "it is the dance, not the dancer". In addition to this, he regards information as an experience as opposed to a possession, that regardless of whether information is stored in a virtual abstract medium like the internet or in a physical product like a book, a person must decode and process this information as an experience - it is not enough to merely own the object. Barlow also maintains that information that isn't moving or interacted with (information that is hoarded) ceases to exist.

Information is a Life form
 

For the second property, Barlow makes the uncanny claim that information literally is a life form in almost all respects except for the fact that it doesn't rely on carbon in its make up. Barlow cites Richard Dawkins' (an evolutionary biologist) proposal of "memes" - which are self replicating patterns of information that replicate and spread themselves across the minds of individuals and society. Dawkins described in his book The Selfish Gene the concept that the phenotypic effects of a gene are not necessarily restricted to an organism's itself, but can spread far into the environment, including the bodies of other organisms or in our case, into society and culture.

In the communicative medium of the internet, where the barriers to information transference between people are broken down, there is clear evidence of the 'meme' phenomenon. There are even dedicated databases that track the origins and propagation of memes throughout the internet:

http://knowyourmeme.com/memes

However The idea that an 'idea' can have a desire, is a difficult one to grasp for me - despite the fact I find that this idea itself seems to be making it's own way into my mind of its own accord.  Yet maybe my attempt to grasp the idea is the problem in the first place. If I am to understand ideas as a self-contained entity then maybe the most efficient way to make sense of it is to establish discourse with others in an attempt to propagate the idea and negotiate its meaning.

Another interesting  perspective that Barlow brings to the table is his assertion that Information, just like life, is perishable. Information quality degrades rapidly both over time and in distance (or separation) from the source of production. This again contrasts sharply with Wilson who thought of Information as objective and what not

Information is a Relationship
 

Finally, Barlow addresses the importance of meaning when talking about Information as a relationship.

Barlow argues that the way information is transmitted to reception is strongly dependent on the relationship between the sender and the receiver. He argues that each communicative relationship is unique, and that receiving information can be as creative as transmitting it. He also refers to 'receptors' in the receiver as important to render a transmission of information meaningful - that is things like shared terminology, language, paradigm, interest and the attention that the receiver must have in order render more meaning to a transmission.

Admittedly, there has been a woefully small amount of critiquing Barlow's positions here, undoubtedly due to the fact that I find myself agreeing with most of his ideas - however it will be interesting to see how Barlows Ideas will contrast with course content that I will come across later down the track.

Sources 

Barlow, John Perry (1994) A Taxonomy of Information. Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science.