A snippet of what I’ve been up to lately (besides finishing the Bronze Age fantasy novel, and looking for a new apartment for fall, etc. etc. etc.): library science grad school. I wrote this as part of a larger discussion about whether information was a commodity or a right; here’s my answer:

I think of information as being like water — freely available (and this last winter more freely available, in the form of snow, than we really wanted it to be), but if you want to do useful things with it on a large scale and/or in a organized or refined state (channel it into hydroelectric dams; get it sanitized, filtered and steaming hot from a tap in your house), you are going to have to pay something for the privilege. There are even boutique applications, like water sold in individual bottles, which is the most expensive way to buy (but sometimes the most convenient).

Some water providers, such as most municipalities, provide water collecting, treatment and distribution services at cost to their communities, while private companies sell it (or access to it) for a profit. Water rights involving rivers and lakes are monitored, negotiated, paid for and often argued over.

So, taking an example nearly at random: census data. If you want to know the makeup of your community, nothing is stopping you from going door-to-door and asking your neighbors how many of them there are, how old they are, etc. Like collecting dew from the grass, this information is lying around for you to pick up, but it is likely to be difficult to gather in any quantity.

The U.S. Census, like a municipal water source, does the gathering, filtering, treatment of that information, and delivers it to citizens via public pipes (the GAO, government web sites).

Private companies can then take that information and process it further, using it to make business decisions (not unlike a factory using water in its production processes), or adding other information, analyzing and reselling it (like those bottled water companies).

Water is a commodity, but it’s also a right, and it obviously wants to be free — it evaporates right out of any open container, and falls wherever it wants to. One thing it doesn’t do, along the lines of Barlow’s taxonomy, is propagate. We can create more out of hydrogen and oxygen at great expense, but really, we pretty much have the amount we’re going to have. Information on the other hand, is easy to propagate, and more is created all the time. (Water also is not perishable, like information is.)

The big difference, of course, is that information is not homogeneous like water is; a sonnet by Shakespeare, a recipe for cupcakes, and a visual depiction of the structure of the caffeine molecule are not put to the same uses, not good for the same things. In that respect, information is never going to be a commodity like corn or wheat — or water. But the water metaphor is still useful in thinking about information control, flow, propagation/distribution, and related issues.