Our model of reality

It`s interesting to observe how different cultures and generations value information differently. Some `information vendors` will try and sell information that others simply give away.

If you look hard enough you can find literally any type of information, brand new or really old, on the Internet - and you don`t typically have to pay for it.

I always think that if you look hard enough you can find literally any type of information, brand new or really old, on the Internet - and you don`t typically have to pay for it. Those who sell information at a premium usually justify the price by mumbling something about value added: "If it were so easy to find it all in the same place, conveniently," they say, "then why do you consider paying us for it?"

Ease of access is indeed a qualifier, because time is money. As you become more skilled in locating information for free, however, or as your company recognises that it can actually save money by employing a dedicated resource to find information rather than paying an expensive online service (whose sole function it is to concatenate information for convenient access in the first place), things become a bit more interesting.

"Should information," you will ask, "intrinsically be free?" I don`t know if I have a straightforward answer to that. Information per se, raw information, is mostly worthless - it`s about what we do with it that elevates it from its value-less state to a place where it makes a real difference to the bottom line. Information retrieval specialists and the so-called knowledge worker are the transformation agents who add value to something whose intrinsic value is very low. It`s not what you have, it`s what you do with it.

Yet, in the current mixed economy (half digital, half widget), raw information is often quite valuable. If you go to a database marketing company and enquire as to the cost of their services, you might be surprised at the commercial value pegged to information of this nature. Again, the alleged `value adds` are said to be what makes one database better than another - the accuracy of the information, the time spent on keeping it accurate, etc.

Information mining has become a big industry, not only in direct marketing but also in market research, opinion gathering, competitive information gathering and other new business disciplines. Companies have grown quite accustomed to paying for synthesised information, from online services and CD-ROM vendors.

But for what I`ll call "the Internet generation" it`s become almost a code of honour to mine your own information. Part of your value to the business world is determined in how well you create something intelligent out of nothing. Some of us have taken that concept a step further and have stopped buying things that aren`t hardware. In the amazing world of the Net, both software and information (the plumbing and that which populates it, respectively) is available for free to those who are willing to put it together themselves. (Manuals and help are also available, for free.)

In the free Unix community (of whichever persuasion: Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, etc.), participants essentially regard themselves as honour-bound not to pay for anything to do with software, ever. The same spirit carries over into the tools of the trade in general - if you can get a really good operating system for free, then why not assume that you can get almost everything else for free as well? The key is `how to get it` and `what you do with it`.

Outside of those two navigational beacons, anything goes, short of stealing it. And of course information of virtually any nature is freely available in all sorts of places. Business intelligence (for some, an oxymoron) is created once the raw information supply is filtered and made malleable in the hands of those who are searching. I sometimes think that the Internet generation works better, more intimately with vast quantities of seemingly unconnected information than its less computer-focused contemporaries. It seems that years of Web surfing, using hyperlinks and the knack to find links in the weirdest places has led to a bit of a revolution in how people put disparate bits of information together; in how they think.

Often obsessively, linkages are established, rumours connected, insinuations and opinions strung together into a coherent whole. The result, in most cases, isn`t presented as a type of knowledge that many of us would find recognisable as Knowledge (capital K). It`s a web of connections and a higher level of grasp of how things hang together. Getting a mite philosophical for a minute, that`s of course how the world itself works: business isn`t a science (apologies to those with Business Science degrees out there) but rather a confusing array of grey areas, rumours, interpersonal relationships and apparently disparate bits of knowledge which can turn into power and profit at the flick of a mental switch, or into disaster if deployed in error.

I think that the Internet, and especially the activity of `surfing`, constitutes a powerful new way of thought and activity. I`ve learned more about relationships and reality by following a set of seemingly disparate connections on the Net than in hundreds of hours of reading books or newspapers. Through all its fabricated realities, tainted by personal bias and normally unforgivable authors` opinions, the Internet has a way of arriving at something akin to the `truth` more effectively than any other information environment I`ve ever come across.

Usually, one of the main criticisms levelled at the Net is its lack of attributed authorship and edited, sanctioned, censored content. "It`s not a believable medium," they say. I say that it works better than any hitherto believable medium in informing people.