Knowing the score

The pursuit of knowledge is shaped by many factors. Over the last decade or so, we have been told that we are entering an Information Age, where information replaces capital and physical resources as the currency of power.

It is an unquestionable fact that Capital and physical resources are not distributed evenly amongst people. Is information any different, and what are the consequences if information is not readily acessible to all people?

There seems to be a lot of naivety expressed in public discourse about information. In the capitalist press, information is said to be free and readily available to all people, even though the capitalist press itself is in the business of selling us information in order to make a profit.

Much like a lot of economic theory, many assumptions that are made in any public debate about knowledge totally ignore reality.

Theories of knowledge and economic theory are closely tied together. The way that our world runs is justified by these theories of economists, who provide the 'scientific' rationale for what the powerful would do anyway.

The economic and social models that are used to justify the amount of tax we pay, how social services are distributed and who gets paid what, make a number of assumptions about knowledge.

These models usually assume that everyone has the same access to information, that information is actively spread around and that everyone has the same ability to act upon the receipt of information. Most of the press in the world, many social commentators and most economists believe (or at least argue) that this is how what they call the free market runs.

Now, while many theories about the world make assumptions, few are as encompassing as the ones made about information and knowledge. These assumptions are highly damaging because they are so false. It doesn't take a genius to realise that these people are assuming that we are all God, able to read every newspaper, listen to every radio program and that everyone reveals any important information that they have. No one can achieve the perfect knowledge that these theories assume. So without even considering social inequality, these beliefs look very shaky.

Free market theories ignore the reality that it is in the interest of many people to hold tightly to information. This is either because they wish to avoid addressing inequality, or they have been brainwashed in an economics school (one of the most successful places of indoctrination ever invented).

Governments do not release information to the people that elect them, unless they are forced to. Corporations keep information from consumers, who may not buy products if they know the full story. They also withold information from their workforce, as many Australian workers have found out over the years. Doctors keep information from you, so that you remain dependent on them.

Information and the pursuit of knowledge are not free. In a capitalist economy, information is a commodity, just as cars and video players are. The value of any commodity is increased if it is not freely available. So, rather than encouraging the distribution of information, a capitalist economy will retard the spread and growth of knowledge.

The suppression of information may not be as obvious as in an authoritarian state like those of Soviet Russia or Nazi Germany, but in many cases it is just as effective. One of the major ways of impeding the free flow of information is to provide vast amounts of junk information at no or little cost, as in the proliferation of different versions of the same product. Then there are the costs and efforts of learning how to access useful information. Education is not free.

In a capitalist society, the spread of information and the pursuit of knowledge will only be encouraged where this produces profit. While this does allow some scope for freedom, it must not be forgotten that a capitalist society is a hierarchy and by its nature is about keeping some people in positions of power at the expense of others. Thus, in many cases it is the non-capitalist, or non-profit sectors of our society that facilitate the greatest expansions and distribution of knowledge.

Yet these sectors are having their activities increasingly determined by money problems. According to the rhetoric of politicians, computer gurus and some educationalists, access to information is becoming more important and we should be able to more freely access information, thus creating a more productive society. However, there is little evidence that this access is becoming more equitable. A concrete example of this is that universities are finding it harder to keep their collections of journals and books up to date and relevant. Thanks to budget cuts, university libraries and departments don't have the money to pay for the knowledge that in many cases they have helped to create.

It is important that we resist the push to privatise even more sources of knowledge and the processes and institutions that produce that knowledge. Far from entering an age of 'information liberation', we are fast entering a situation where corporations control even more information than they used to. They are patenting knowledge gathered by local communities over millenia, they claim copyright over what was formerly common property, they assert trademarks over everyday words. These corporations take knowledge produced in the public sector, or by the community, knowledge that they have paid little or nothing for, and then charge us to access this information.

Let's return to considering academia. The university sector produces an incredible amount of new knowledge, in a wide variety of fields. In the 1970s, many academics, showing what in hindsight (and perhaps even at the time), can only be considered naivety, handed the publishing of academic journals to a number of commercial publishers. More and more journals were being published, and it was thought that publishing was too much hard work.

Unfortunately, academics also handed over the intellectual property rights to these publishers. These same publishers now control a very important process, that of peer review, where articles are reviewed by other scholars. Commerical entities now control an integral part of university life, with academics careers being heavily determined by their publications. While current day universities are hardly democratic and open structures, the shift to further commercialisation is something that should be fought against.

If we are really to enter the Information Age, then information and knowledge must become free from commercial control. Of course, this is not the kind of development that our governments and corporate masters want to see. Rather, they envisage an Information Age where more and more people spend time on computers and in call centers, while corporations struggle to keep knowledge of their disgusting activities hidden from our eyes. In the mean time they will seek to gain as much information on us as possible, so that they can pitch their advertising more successfully.

The Internet (e-mail, the web, ftp, etc.) offers one possibility of overcoming commercial control over publishing and the knowledge gathering process. Maintaining a server is not that costly or difficult compared to publishing a journal. However there is always the possibility that those who seek to go this way will find themselves without jobs, or unable to do the research that they wish to undertake.

As individuals, we can reject the notion of copyright as promoted by commercial interests and promote either anti-copyright, copyleft, or non-profit copyright arrangements. All of these phenomena encourage the spread of information and allow ordinary people to gain access to new ideas and technologies. As groups we can create structures and media which are freely accessed and we can resist the control of information by hiearchical organisations which are happy to keep us ignorant.