Jimmy Wales, temporarily posting to Lawrence Lessig’s blog, is authoring a series of posts on “things that will be free.” He began with encyclopedias using his own work on wikipedia as an example. His second post (the link above) concerns curriculum – he means curriculum materials such as books.
I continue to think about this topic and keep coming up with abstract arguments that attempt to express my disagreement. I cannot disagree with the notion that “knowledge must be free.” Is this really what they mean. My knowledge is my knowledge and my knowledge only. It is something I have created for myself. If I try to explain it to you by talking or writing AT you, it is now my information. You may or may not use this information to create your own knowledge. The question should really be whether information should be free. I guess this will end up being an empirical question. Some, such as Wales, contend that some scholars will share information for free and it will then be impossible for others to receive a return on the information they want to share with the expectation that they be compensated.
Free is also a misrepresentation of what is proposed. Free television is really not free. The material is paid for by sponsors who expose us to ads and recoup their costs from the money we pay for the goods we are convinced to purchase. Google is not free – it is based on a model that recoups costs through ads. MIT pays the faculty members who generate the courseware on their site. The site functions as an ad for this institution and is a way to bolster institutional prestige which can be bartered for tuition and grant dollars. I make the assumption that academics will participate in projects that require them to share information to the extent they feel their contributions will be accepted as scholarship. I receive no compensation from readers for the scholarly articles I publish in journals. However, I am expected to be “productive” by my institution and scholarly publications are a sign of this productivity. Should academic institutions “respect” contributions to widipedia I would guess more “scholars” would spend their time attempting to generate such contributions.
Think I am wrong – I guarantee you that at this moment publishers are considering using ads as a way to reduce the cost of textbooks to consumers (Toronto Star). This is kind of an intermediate point on the perceived continuum of free — paid. The cost is reduced, but the content now includes ads. My point – little information is actually free, we simply misperceive how we pay for it.
I hope you do not regard me as cynical. I simply assume most human behavior is motivated. Now, I must go and contemplate why I took the time to write this comment.
