Information I

Published on Sunday, May 1st 2011. Edited by Rat Outacefew.

It is true that the new currency is that of information in the sense that a value is placed on the exchange of and the withholding of information.
Believe me, do not doubt that the head of information, its ubiquity through sharing, needs the tail, secrecy, withholding and falsity. I shall return to this.
Somehow, it is spoken of as both a new thing, a good thing and different due to its volume. But there seems to be a lot of confusion in this.
One point is that many little pieces of information, each with a little value, exchanged rapidly sum to a great value.
However, what is lost when the flow of life is atomised so?

There are different ways in which this atomisation is accomplished.

Paying attention to many small quanta of information (Constant amount of data:- The datum is already quantised but we only pay attention to the quanta, rather than what is consequential upon the datum).
Fragmenting datum by further mensuration (Increased amount of data).
Fragmenting datum by extracting particular qualities (Decreased amount of data:- Filtering data according to type - qualities).

I shall proceed to look at each of the above in turn starting with the first 'psychological' one.

The first certainly is very puzzling while being, perhaps, the most common approach.
It is psychological. While people are wanting to exploit streams of data, looking at that possibility and believing some extra payload can be attached to it (some form of advertisement is typical; there are other possibilities) they don't want to think, in fact they are unable to think, about the datum qua datum in the larger field of consequences.