Читать книгу Information Wants to Be Shared - Joshua Gans - Страница 7

The premise of this book is that such sharing is not specific to information about the time (as it was for Einstein) or information about prospects (as it was for the forty-niners). Sharing is a general characteristic of information. If I were a philosopher, I might ponder whether information, kept solely to myself, is of any value. But I’m not. Instead, I am an economist, so that directs me to think about how the sharing of information alters its demand and supply. The answer turns out to be: a lot.

The changes in technology over the last few decades have laid bare some core economics that can be summarized by the notion that “information wants to be shared.” The reasons are twofold. First, in supplying information, the costs of its creation will be more easily covered if its use can be spread across more individuals, sharing those costs. Second, the demand for information, in general, will be higher when users know that others have access to it. This may be for utilitarian reasons, as in the case of time, or for social reasons, as I will argue describes much of the demand for news. ^[4]

The notion that information wants to be shared has a precursor in Stewart Brand’s idea, “Information wants to be free.” Inspired by the quote, many have advocated that information entrepreneurs—specifically, providers of content—consider business models that offer information at no charge. In chapter 2, I evaluate this contention by unpacking the various alternative interpretations of the notion of free information, including a consideration of a business model based on free information. That said, it is far from obvious that such business models are the right way to proceed.

The question of what information really wants is the subject of chapter 3. Information, I argue, apropos the title of this book, wants to be shared, and I show precisely what that might mean from an economics perspective. I start with the supply-side notion that sharing of information provides opportunities to divide up the costs of its creation. In so doing, sharing can facilitate “agreement” about the apportionment of those costs. On the demand side, in many cases information that is shared can generate network effects (making joint consumption more valuable than individual consumption), especially in environments where consumer attention is scarce. Providing information where sharing is easy can give entrepreneurs an important competitive advantage.

Having established the basic economics of shared information, I turn to two industries—books and newspapers. While “disruption” is certainly a good word to describe what each is going through, the new technology enables us to expose what is really the essence of value creation in each industry. Having a firm grasp on that essence allows us to see precisely which functions will likely continue to exist in the future.

In chapter 4, I examine book publishing and its history. Books went from being a shared good (with access provided by libraries) to an owned good (with consumers owning their own copy). Digitization, though, forces us to consider the essence of a book, not in its paperbound form but as an offer for a claim on people’s attention, an offer that relies upon the activities of individuals to filter for quality. Traditional publishers performed that function with the aid of costly binding; spending so much money to actually produce a book was a kind of signal of quality. But with digitization, many have entered the “publisher space” that was formerly locked up by just a few. Moreover, the virtual elimination of distribution costs for books has brought us back full circle to the idea, once embodied in libraries, of easy access rather than ownership. Indeed, that ownership model is currently what appears to be holding reading back.

Chapter 5 then turns to the plight—there really is no other word for it—of the newspapers. For sheer reasons of timeliness, news readership is moving online. But advertising revenue has not followed readers online, and newspapers are struggling. Their reaction has been to experiment with various models to get their readers to pay for the news. Such approaches, while they seem commonsensical, stand in opposition to the sharing of information. And yet the value of sharing news is very high. This is made all the more important when one considers that the likely cause of newspaper woes is on the advertising side of the business that has not faired well online. A possible reason for this is that people now consume news from an increasing variety of outlets. This makes it harder for advertisers to know what they are paying for. When people divide their attention, advertisers need to guess where to target them. Technologies may solve the targeting problem, but news outlets could help themselves by reconsidering the way they present information. Facebook, with its sharing model for the news, is, in fact, solving the problem in the advertising market by providing a magnet for consumers and a target for advertisers. In the process, it is demonstrating what the future of news organizations might look like. In addition, a sharing perspective might lead news outlets to focus on other means of obtaining payment for how the news is presented rather than for the news itself.

Thinking about shared information, and innovative business models to achieve it, is really in its infancy. Platforms are developing that allow content to be distributed and then read easily. These are likely to produce important competitive forces for consumer attention. In addition, while this book focuses on shared information in the sense of its distribution, efforts are emerging to facilitate sharing in the creation of information itself. Consequently, if information really wants to be shared, we are likely to find more ways to do just that in the future.

1. See the account by Peter Galison, Einstein’s Clocks, Poincare’s Maps: Empires in Time (New York: Norton, 2003). This book was brought to my attention by Scott Stern, who had been asking the question, “If patents were granted for non-obvious inventions, then what was non-obvious to Einstein?” It turns out that the answer may well have been clocks.

2. As James Gleick documents, getting to shared time took a tremendous amount of effort, from the precision of atomic clocks to the housing of the actual time at the old Naval Observatory on the grounds of the US Vice President’s residence; see Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything (London: Little Brown, 1999).

3. Richard Stillson, Spreading the Word: A History of Information in the California Gold Rush (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006).

4. In expositing this view, I will rely on the tools of economic theory. And, for that reason, while I will frequently allude to examples that illustrate the theory’s implications, I cannot claim here to be providing proof. Nonetheless, if every theory required proof as it was exposited, there would be no progress. So there is important value in this exercise.