Robin Good has published a two-part essay by Australian professor Brian Martin, originally a chapter in a 1998 book called Information Liberation. It's a provocative essay which I can recommend for its intellectual interest without necessarily recommending its premise. Part I is Why Mass Media Are Bad: Weaknesses And Limitations Of Commercial Mainstream Media (link) and Part II is The Power Of Open Participatory Media And Why Mass Media Must Be Abandoned (link).
I've been taking notes of late about the concept of an information theory of value, something not original with me but which doesn't seem to have reached escape velocity from the gravity of the acadame. Think of it as an analogue to -- or perhaps even a replacement for -- the labor theory of value which is still a key element of classical economics and about which I read more than my share as an undergraduate and graduate student. In this case, though, you have Claude Shannon perhaps unwittingly playing the rôle of David Ricardo or Adam Smith, people like Dr. Martin above playing the politicizing rôle of Karl Marx, and a whole range of open sourcers, bloggers, and distribution techies re-creating anarcho-syndicalism. --Dennis
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