a Bible in any hotel room. They're worthless as commodities, but
not valueless to humankind. Money and value are not identical.
What's information *really* about? It seems to me there's something
direly wrong with the "Information Economy." It's not about data,
it's about attention. In a few years you may be able to carry the
Library of Congress around in your hip pocket. So? You're never
gonna read the Library of Congress. You'll die long before you
access one tenth of one percent of it. What's important --
*increasingly important* -- is the process by which you figure out
what to look at. This is the beginning of the real and true
economics of information. *Not* who owns the books, who prints the
books, who has the holdings. The crux here is *access,* not
holdings. And not even *access* itself, but the signposts that tell
you *what* to access -- what to pay attention to. In the
Information Economy *everything* is plentiful -- except attention.
That's why the spin-doctor is the creature who increasingly rules
the information universe. Spin doctors rule our attention. Never
mind that man behind the curtain. No, no! Look at my hand! I can
make a candidate disappear. Watch me pull a President out of a hat.
Look! I can make these starving people disappear in a haze of media
noise. Nothing up my sleeve. Presto! The facts don't matter if he
can successfully direct our *attention.*
Spin-doctors are like evil anti-librarians; they're the Dark Side
of the Force.
Librarians used to be book-pullers. Book-pullers. I kind of like
the humble, workaday sound of that. I like it kind of better than
I like the sound of "information retrieval expert," though that's
clearly where librarians are headed. Might be the right way to
head. That's where the power seems to be. Though I wonder exactly
what will be retrieved, and what will be allowed to quietly mummify
in the deepest darkest deserts of the dustiest hard-disks.
I like libraries and librarians, I owe my career to libraries and
librarians. I respect Mr. Franklin. I hate seeing books turned into
a commodity and seeing access to books turned into a commodity. I
do like bookstores too, and of course I earn my living by them, but
I worry about them more and more. I don't like chainstores and I
don't like chain distributors. We already have twelve human beings
in the US who buy all the science fiction books for the twelve
major American distributors. They're the information filters and
the attention filters, and their criterion i s the bottom line, and
the bottom line is bogus and a fraud. I don't like megapublishers
either. Modern publishing is owned by far too few people. They're
the people who own the means of production, and worse yet, they own
far too much of the means of attention. They determine what we get
to pay attention to.
