December 10, 2008
The Price of Information and the Internet
Clay Shirky breaks it down:
This last transformation is something of a conundrum – one of the principal effects of the much-touted ‘Information Economy’ is actually to devalue information more swiftly and more fully. Information is only power if it is hard to find and easy to hold, but in an arena where it is as fluid as water, value now has to come from elsewhere.
The Internet wipes out of both the difficulty and the expense of geographic barriers to distribution, and it does it for individuals and multi-national corporations alike. “Content as product” is giving way to “content as service”, where users won’t pay for the object but will pay for its manipulation (editorial imprimatur, instant delivery, custom editing, filtering by relevance, and so on.).
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that seems spot on.
Shirky knows what’s up.
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