From an interview with Richard A. Lanham:
Second, how to “make sense of the enormous flow of free information” is another question altogether, at least if I understand you. If you mean, “how do we explain the explosion of free information provided by the internet?,” then there are a lot of answers to that, some beyond the traditional purview of economics. People put up information on the web often for the pure pleasure of sharing what they know-the pleasure of teaching. They don’t expect money to follow. They are being paid in a different coin, the pleasure of teaching, which includes of course the attention your readers/viewers/students pay to you. One of the great surprises, at least to me, about the internet-based information explosion is the extraordinary human generosity which it has revealed. People want to share their information, their enthusiasms, their way of looking at the world and now they have a new and infinitely more effective way to do it. It may be what they know about Barbie dolls, or about digital cameras, or the specifications of sewer pipe for your house-the range is infinite. It is far more surprising, at least to me, how often people want to give this information away than how they want to be paid for it. So, how to explain the “enormous flow of free information”? Emphatically, not just in the expectation of future profit. Quite the opposite. This generosity of spirit has not been so remarked as it ought to have been.
I like this idea, and i think for the large part that it’s true; the internet and the sharing of information is made possible by the fact that the while we might never become film critics for the new york times (see 2 posts before this) that there is a whole bunch of things that we can share, and that we can, through our blogs and through this generosity of spirit, overcome a bit of the smallness, the anonymity, the feeling of being nobody and nothing.
I don’t know if i;m just gushing but isn’t there a fundamental loneliness to our society and civilization (or just this era?) that goes beyond just the regular run of the mill existential loneliness of all human beings? Nevermind that’s gotta be wrong. But there is something to it, there is something at work in all that sharing–the revival of an older ethic, the revival and revitalization of a certain set of values. It’s strangely democratic, but because we are all selective about both what we consume (and therefore, as the same logic applies to othes) who are we are read or “consumed” by, it doesn’t devolve into the sterile massified thing.
