My Definition of an Information Economy (After very long days of work.. strangely enough..)
I found this article on the Digg Founders Profile after signing up today. http://digg.com/political_opinion/The_Information_Economy
The Information Economy By Cory Doctorow, in The Guardian.
MY RESPONSE TO THE ABOVE ARTICLEÂ (READ ARTICLE IT FIRST!)
“The thinking is simple: an information economy must be based on buying and selling information. Therefore, we need policies to make it harder to get access to information unless you’ve paid for it.” I disagree heavily with this idea. Buying & Selling should never be the focus of work, but rather the life experiences. People who just want the $$ will just push their minds to work up until they reached a certain pay level. The true potentials of life will Never be reached this way.
Most people in the world are thinking in terms of the current potentials of information. A lot of people tend to believe that there isn’t enough to go around, so they have to fight for their own (i.e. through controlling and selling information). But, this is not true if information sharing is logically extended with perpetual transparency. Watch “The Secret” a documentary about the true infiniteness of the universe and it discusses focusing feelings only on what you want, instead of what you don’t want to do.
Now who here wants to hold superiority over others by controlling information that those people could have potentially used independently in a positive productive way?  I think that in 20-30 years (if freedom persists) there will be enough potential for society to become focused upon Self-Sufficiency and Self-Education. The only thing society needs is a source to become highly informed, which is just starting with the internet. The population is slowly waking up, but they may need help.
This is where my definition of the information economy comes in. The wiki and social collaborators will build up huge interactive information databases. Over time the physical “reality” information (world w/o the internet) will be surpassed by logically organized digital multimedia information with natural and universally understood topic categories and subcategories. There will probably be so many cross linkages between categories (& forms of media & multimedia) that it will seem everything is a fully digitally interactive real-world.
If people focus on the technology for long-term self-sufficiency and self-education, then this “information economy” will allow the public to live higher standards of living while causing less impact upon the environment. If people were actually trying to work together for a better self-managed world for everyone, our society would become much more like that of the Native Americans. The Indians would use pretty much 100% of everything that took from the land, and people in the future will do the same but along a “conveyor belt of information based-realities” through which individual productivity and efficiency would ensure a much more powerful use of mental, physical, and natural resources than that of today.
