Information Economy

Information Economy is an as of yet definitionless buzzword attempting to describe contemporary processes of the integration of interconnected digital information into the traditional physical economy as a "real" load-bearing feature of it's structure. "The Information Economy" is still in it's process of development and thus cannot be adequately described until this hyperobject reaches it's tangible instantiation and can be reified by society's understanding of it. However, various thinkers with their own understandings are speculating about the implications of it's early symptoms and their development. Topics such as Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, XML, Universal Language and the Semantic Web are related spheres of discourse, each of which contains technical approaches that may turn out valuable towards this transformation in the means of production.

Perspectives

"Money, the "alienated essence of work" as some philosophers have put it, is also information. I once saw Jon Bosak hold up a dollar bill in front of an XML-aware technical audience, saying, "This is an interesting document." The huge emphasis that our culture places on the acquisition of money is a powerful demonstration of our confidence in the power of information to reflect reality or, more accurately, in the power of information to affect reality. In the United States, we have a priesthood called the Federal Reserve Board, answerable to no one, whose responsibility is to protect and maximize the power of U.S. dollars to affect reality. The Fed seeks to control monetary inflation, for example, because inflation represents a diminishment of that power. Thinking of money as a class of information suggests an illustration of the importance of context to the significance of information for individuals and communities: given the choice, most of us prefer money to be in the context of our own bank accounts. Thinking of money as information leads one to wonder whether information and money in some sense are the same thing. Some information commands a very large amount of money, and the visions of venture capitalists and futurists are often based on such intellectual property. In some circles, the term information economy has become a pious expression among those who are called upon to increase shareholder value. (On the other hand, the economic importance of information can be overstressed. Information when eaten is not nourishing, and when it is put into fuel tanks, it does not make engines run.) "

- Sam Hunting, ed., XML Topic Maps: Creating and Using Topic Maps for the Web (Boston: Addison-Wesley, 2003)., Chapter 3, Page 24