Re: <nettime> Roberto Verzola: Abundance and the Generative Logic of the Commons

[Florian Cramer <fc-nettime@pleintekst.nl>]

On Wednesday, November 24 2010, 15:01 (+0100), nettime's avid reader wrote:
 
> 1: The Internet is creating an abundance of information and knowledge
> 
> This is hardly news by now. New technologies have made possible a global 
> digital infrastructure, which, in turn, has given rise to a new information 
> economy. This economy has one obvious feature: the abundance of free or 
> low-cost information and knowledge. 

Isn't it really an abundance of _data_, but not automatically one of
information (in the sense of 'a difference that makes a difference' )
and knowledge?

Isn't, on the contrary, an abundance of data conflicting with a scarcity
of human work time, and material compensation, for critically examining
data in order to turn it into information and knowledge? And haven't the
cybernetic pipe dreams of algorithmic-social filters (from PageRank to
crowdsourcing to retweeting...) all failed in this respect?

> Anderson puts it. Furthermore, it does seem that ???information wants to be 
> free???. Something is driving it to multiply. 

Data multiplies, but information?

> On the Internet, we can fully express the primal human urge to communicate. 
> This is why we have information abundance.

See above. The problem is that as data becomes more abundant, resources
for their critical examination become proportionally scarcer.

Florian

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