Information Is A Commodity
Our relationship to information has changed. I became aware of this not for the first time but somehow more acutely just recently when helping my 8 year old daughter Nina, with her homework. Back in the day...when I was a child and had a report to do I went right straight to the encyclopedia, which I understood to be the fountain of all truth. I would dutifully look up my subject and copy out all the information found there, re-arranging some words and adding a little color and bam, that would be my report. As I grew older and more pages were required I would go to the library check out a few select books and pull together my story from their, all properly cited of course. But again the truth was right there in the pages on the shelf. Today my daughter and I go to the online version of the Encyclopedia Britanica, where there are big colorful pictures, links and videos and animations and my daughter who has come to expect information to be this way scrolls down the page until she fi...