In Internet, News Chooses YOU!

So I promised no more marketing-related posts, but this really isn't that so don't worry. The Beautiful Competition returned from Barcelona a couple of days ago and has been sick, giving me a project this weekend that's keeping me in the house, and I've been slammed at work (but in a good way) so I haven't had time to come up with anything very creative. But this has been "knocking about," at my new countryfolk might say, in the back of my head and I want to get it down on paper.

I'm often wary of a lot of the iconoclastic ways people discuss the Internet - print is dead, print is worthless, this is the new way and the old way doesn't matter, blah blah blah. I realized though that the structure of the Internet has allowed a fundamental shift in how I receive information - not just news, but information of any kind.

Taken as a whole the Internet is nothing more than a vast repository for information: most of it worthless or irrelevant, but information nonetheless. At its most fundamental level, it is a series of wires (not tubes, although tubes could describe fiber optics and - never mind) connecting computers together in a huge network - but those wires would do nothing if it weren't for the information flowing between them. Series of 1s and 0s, vast volumes of information being sorted, routed, directed and stored. If I wanted to, with two or three clicks of my mouse I could make all the information on my hard drive accessible to anyone in the world who wanted a peek.

It wasn't that there was a lack of information before the Internet, there just wasn't a good way to store and share it. Right at this very second I'm staring at a device smaller than a half a stick of gum that holds 2 GB worth of information. According to an old forum thread I just Googled, it can hold about 10,000 books. Until about 20 years ago, that would have been impossible. Actually until about a year ago it would have been impossible, but I'm talking digital storage vs. physical storage. It is now incredibly inexpensive to house and share quantities of information that you could not before; imagine storing 10,000 books on clay tablets in the Babylonian era - it would have taken a small city. And to transport them around the world? Armies of slaves. Even the original Library of Alexandria can't hold a candle to what I can do with my 80 GB iPod right now.

The end result of this is that there's now a whole lot of information out there available to anyone with a computer and Internet access at the touch of a button. With broadband and wireless penetration reaching record numbers - the wireless Internet in Africa puts some areas of the US to shame, even though it's all happening on mobile phones - and the OLPC program has set the bar low enough that a world where everyone is online is actually conceivable - we're all part of a vast network of information. It's happening, right now.

And the most fundamental, iconoclastic and hyperbolic paradigm shift isn't that we have all this information at our fingertips - it's what we're doing with it. It's how we're dealing with it - being forced to deal with it really.

As I noted a good deal of the information out there is either worthless or irrelevant - either on an overall level or a personal level. While someone out there is interested in the migratory patterns of bees or what Alexei in St. Petersburg had for breakfast, I'm not. So we've been forced to develop ways to sort through this information on our own.

Enter RSS and other kinds of information aggregators - and this is the fundamental shift. Now instead of others choosing the kind of information I receive (whether a paper or a TV station will cover a story or the way they cover it, the limited number of books that a publisher or editor chooses to publish and so forth) I choose that information myself. I select which news sources I pay attention to, by a mixture of interest and trust. I'm more interested in what people like Brandon and Seth and Jon and Kevin are sharing through their Google Reader items than what CNN thinks is important.

We're only just now beginning to realize the implications of this change, and it is the cornerstone of how the Internet and the New Media is will affect how we process information. And it's not simply a matter of being able to choose; with choice comes responsibility. We're now responsible to no one but ourselves for the information we choose to process and gather and share with others.

It's an interesting, scary and empowering prospect no?

The Value of Information Age

About the time I was in high school - or possibly before, because I wasn't paying attention - someone declared our modern times the "information age," attempting to indicate that information would become the most valuable commodity. Only recently have I really come to realize some of the deeper implications of that moniker.

Information as a commodity is nothing new; historically speaking, one of the reasons Alexander the Great was so successful was that he constantly scouted ahead to gather intelligence not only on the military strength of a region but on the disposition and current political landscapes of it. Sun Tzu said:

Thus, what enables the wise sovereign and the good general to strike and conquer, and achieve things beyond the reach of ordinary men, is FOREKNOWLEDGE.

1. That is, knowledge of the enemy's dispositions, and what he means to do.

Now this foreknowledge cannot be elicited from spirits; it cannot be obtained inductively from experience, nor by any deductive calculation.
Knowledge of the enemy's dispositions can only be obtained from other men.

Emphasis mine.

In a way, the conversation research aspect of online marketing - the role I increasingly find myself in - is exactly what Sun Tzu is talking about, but rather than our enemies we're gathering information about customers and potential customers. We're not assessing the strength of their armies just by counting troops, we're surveying the political landscape to best figure out how our policies will map to their policies.

But a lot of the research that goes into building out our reports comes from sources that we pay for in one way or another. There are subscription-based news aggregators, and of course our clients pay us for our time. And the information itself, in its raw form, is somewhat useless: we not only play the role of intelligence gathering but we play the role of general to a certain degree, offering advice based on what we can synthesize from the information provided.

And certainly there is value in that, but the not-so-cynical part in my asks: what is the value of other information? Certainly my friends Roger and Angela, who have chosen more academic careers, are doing something very similar to what I do: gathering data, synthesizing it, creating something new. But the nature of academia is that they will never (and trust me when I say this is criminal) make as much as someone in the private sector for doing the same basic kind of work and, arguably, more important work than figuring out how better to sell people things they don't really need anyway.

Which is to say nothing about experiential information. Can you even place a dollar value on the kinds of information and the kinds of synthesis that comes with age and experience? Certainly a job that requires "10-15 years experience" pays more than one that requires "1-2 years" but take, for example, my trip to Spain - is there any way to put an actual value on the experience and perspective I gained from that trip? Somehow I doubt it.

I leave the post open-ended for the Puppeteers to weigh in on if they wish.

Also: thanks to all who commented on my last post!

Digg Dugg, Part Deux

When I went to bed last night, Digg was in a state of lockdown - stories being deleted and users being banned. I woke up this morning none the wiser, and was planning on talking about Digg's reaction for a bit.

But then, around 9PM last night, Kevin Rose (Digg's owner) had a change of heart:

But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.

If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.

And I'm not really sure what to make of this. It still may be too early for proper analysis, so bear with me if I 180 on this in a couple of days.

Last night, I blogged about the beginning of the kerfluffle, and (in my near-brain-dead state) said that Digg's users were acting like "spoiled children" and wondered if the consequence of too much information is that "that we no longer exercise discretion in the sharing of it." And I still kind of agree with that. I'll be frank: I find Digg's primary user base to be biased and narcissistic. But that is the price of an experiment like Digg, which allows anyone to vote and comment on news stories. Hell, that's the price of any democracy: that the system can and likely will be co-opted by people who are short-sighted regarding the consequences of their actions, who are obsessed with their own personal agendas, and are not necessarily thinking of the survivability of the whole.

I intended to applaud Digg's discretion at cracking down on this story, because the owners of Digg need to exercise their own self-interest (IE, the survivability of the site.) But in retrospect, I think their decision to allow the hex code to be shared is in many ways more true to the spirit of the site they founded. Rose's blog post made clear that the consequences of this action could very well be that the site gets shut down, and if Digg users still want to vote the story with the hex code up, so be it.

However.

There's the other aspect to this story - the information aspect. While Digg may be the focal point of this battle, a Google search for the key (not linked here - I refuse to be a part of this "revolt," even though I may have quietly squirreled away a copy of the key on my thumbdrive) and it returns some 36,000 hits (source: BoingBoing) - as of 9AM PST on May 2. And that number will only grow. The AACS is basically fucked here: the DeCSS DVD key shared circa 1999 was only of interest to a much smaller web-based community. Now, it's literally everywhere, and someone with a dial-up AOL account can have it in seconds (even if they wouldn't know how to put it to use.)

It's simply not possible to put the genie back in the bottle at this point. The question becomes, and it's one I've asked before, at what point does responsibility and discretion kick in?

I don't have time for a proper thought experiment on this, so I'll simply ask the question and let it percolate.