IDs are in the business of handling information. They strive to turn information into actionable knowledge by using what they know about human motivation and learning. They do this in a technology-mediated environment. They do it in fields that they are almost invariably outsiders in. They do this in conjunction with various faculty, administrators and graduate students.

This issue of information comes up in intriguing ways - from academic papers to novels. This musing originated with a couple pieces of writing recently.

The Future Ownership of Information

Tim O'Reilly writes: "The race is on to own certain classes of core data: location, identity, calendaring of public events, product identifiers and namespaces. In many cases, where there is significant cost to create the data, there may be an opportunity for an Intel Inside style play, with a single source for the data. In others, the winner will be the company that first reaches critical mass via user aggregation, and turns that aggregated data into a system service" (O'Reilly, Sept. 30, 2005 / Updated June 24, 2006, p. 12).

He asserts this after making a fairly solid business case for the shape of the future.

Right now, the Web model is an open-sharing system for the public stuff, password-protected access to the higher-level academic stuff, and deep black box cover for the highly proprietary stuff.

"Snow Crash"

Writer Neal Stephenson, in his highly inventive classic Snow Crash (circa 1992), describes a mysterious virtual "drug" that is pushed in the MetaVerse. A person who actually takes up this dealer opens up the program, which is a potent way to reach into the human minds of certain developers and cause an irrecoverable system crash. Purely through the eyes. Straight from the eyes and into the brain.

It's potent code. It's reading something that should be verboten. It's automatic reactions of the brain to instructions. (Humans, of course, can be activated by ideas and images - but optimally, their decision-making goes through some sort of cognitive and ethical and emotional filter.) In this novel, the code gets right to the brain core and burns out the system, putting the one who has read this code in a symbol-induced coma.

(Hope that wasn't a plot spoiler for anyone. The book was published a lot of years ago.)

Information, Value, Ownership and "Truth"

Information today is valued according to its rareness, its accuracy and its deployment in the world, where some information acts as a lever and can change different realities. Some sensations and some information can blow users' minds (in the Snow Crash sense and in others).

As the late Neal Postman had argued, people need to have a way to vet information to know what's real. Without any points of reference, anything may be asserted and believed, without passing through the critical mind. Human gullibility has few bounds.

The challenges of vetting may become that much harder with increased organizational controls over information and their distributions along highly controlled and concentrated channels.

O'Reilly, T. (2005, Sept. 30; updated 2006, June 24). What is Web 2.0? Design patterns and business models for the next generation of software. www.oreillynet.com. pp. 1 - 20.