"Several years ago I was talking with Tim O'Reilly about the discomfort we both felt about treating information as a commodity. It seemed to us that information was something more, and quite different, than the communicable form of knowledge. It was not a commodity, exactly, and was insulted by the generality we call "content".
Information, we observed, is derived from the verb *inform,* which is related to the verb *form*. To *inform* is not to "deliver information", but rather to *form* the other party. If you tell me something I didn't know before, I am changed by that. If I believe you, and value what you say, I have granted you authority. Meaning, I have given you the right to *author* what I know. Therefore, *we are all authors of each other*. This is a profoundly human condition in any case, but it is an especially important aspect of the open source value system. By forming each other, as we also form useful software, we are making the world. Not merely changing it."
Not sure that I have come across such a concept of "Active" information before, especially in relation to "information" "authoring" or "forming" something within a person - the very act of communicating information becomes an active involvement in creating something new in another.
Surely there must be some philosophical or psychological precursor to this notion? Who else wrote about such concepts?
No comments:
Post a Comment