I think – whatever the size of the auto industry in Canada – my earlier cite from the factfinder indicates that information really is big business – almost ten times the size of the auto business. What is “plain and objectively” false should be, you know, plain and objectively false, instead of easily demonstrated with cites of reliable sources.
You also missed Sage Rat’s point completely. He was suggesting that “information” is a huge part of the physical goods industries. For many, probably not the auto industry, but certainly soft drinks and sneakers other goods, the advertising absolutely dwarfs the manufacturing. Whether you realize it or not, you are paying for the “marketing hogwash.” The “goods” you pay for are brand recognition and status, which are created through advertising. Like it or not, if you bought a Ford, some of your money paid not for the actual vehicle but for Toby Kieth to sing crappy songs on TV.
Incidentally, IIRC, all Canadian manufacturing of cars is manufacturing of US cars, i.e., we have a deal worked out where Canadians get jobs building our cars, and they don’t compete with us. I highly, highly doubt such a deal is so constructed that the Canadian manufacturing is hidden from US economic data, and so dwarfs US production that it would pass “Information” as an industry in sales. You are certainly welcome to provide cites (as opposed to claims) otherwise. However, even proving that (which you won’t), the information industry is still undeniably huge and McLuhan was on the money. Heh.
By all means. Here is a table of vehicles produced in the three NAFTA countries, by year. As you can see, Canada actually produced more vehicles per capita than the USA does (knowing that the population is about one ninth the size):
Maybe you’ve never been here, but we do make more than beavers, hockey sticks and beer; it’d be impossible to drive through southern Ontario and NOT see the automotive industry’s awesome size and power here, since they like to put their assembly plants right next to the 401. All of the Big 3 have major assembly plants here, plus Honda and Toyota have major assembly plants; Toyota (or is it Honda?) is building yet another. The number of parts manufacturers staggers the imagination. The world’s biggest independent part manufacturing conglomerate (I think it’s still the biggest) is based in Canada.
Most of the cars made here, of course, are purchased by American consumers. It’s quite possible your car was made here.
I don’t even understand this; are you saying that cars produced at a Honda plant in Ontario somehow end up in the U.S. GDP? Uh, no. And what would NAFTA have to do with “hiding” economic numbers? NAFTA does not cause the member nations to conflate simple numbers like “How many cars we built last year.”
The claim I scoffed at there was that your claim that there was essentially no automobile industry in Canada. That claim is simply wrong, and I’ve provided cites, so there you go.
I do back down on my claim that the automotive industry is the biggest industry in the First World, inasmuch as A) my cite is in a book 3000 kilometres away so I cannot support it anyway and B) I think maybe it was in CANADA, not the First World.
But that’s simply not the case; I bought a CAR, not an ad. Ford paid for the ad, and fine, that’s in the information category, but let’s not double-count those dollars. That was Ford’s expenditure, not mine, and believe me, they still paid more to make the car than they did to get Toby Keith to sing about it. If we’re going to count information vs. products, let’s do it honestly and put product spending in the product category, and information spending in the information category. We could pry into every dollar and figure out how much of every product had an information component, but it goes the other way too; information can’t be transmitted without the materials of media.
Look, where does your money go? Ultimately all money is being paid out of the pocket of the consumer, so ask yourself where consumer dollars go. Be honest, now; do you spend most of your money on information, or do you spend it on stuff? I’d guess it’s 90% on stuff. Food. Clothing. Shelter. Vehicles. Transportation. Furniture. Dishes. Cleaning supplies. Food for the cat. Air conditioning and heating. Gardening supplies. Etc., etc. Sure, you spend SOME money on information, but it’s dwarfed just by your food and shelter, unless you’re a kid or still living in your parents’ basement (and then they’re paying it for you.) Our lives are primarily material.
I’m not trying to deny the importance of information in the economy, but ridiculous crap like McLuhan’s claim that we don’t trade much in material things anymore is the sort of idiocy that caused the tech bubble and subsequent burst, when you had people actually saying with a straight face that countries could get rich without making anything anymore. Look AROUND you; where do you think most of our economic activity is concentrated? Grocery stores. Gas stations. Car dealerships. Shopping malls. Department stores. Wal-Marts. The zillions of trucks you see racing along the highways carrying… stuff. Jillions and skillions of dollars worth of stuff. Even a lot of what is classified as “Service” is simply fixing, moving, or changing stuff.
My point about the cars made in Canada is that they are making cars for US plants, so the value of those cars would be reflected in US economic data. There are Canadian plants, but no Canadian companies.
I am aware that Canadians do more than play hockey. They also produce media theory.
A plant in Windsor does not make a car for a plant in Kentucky. It’s made in one place or the other.
Of course GM, Honda, etc. have headquarters in other countries, but the economic data would be in Canada’s GDP; that’s how it works, and that’s the only logical way to calculate it. Heck, they’re even operating as incorporated entities in Canada; Ford Canada, GM Canada, etc. The United States does not count cars made in Canada as being made in the USA; that would not make any sense at all. Things being made in Canada and then sold back to the USA are the reason the U.S. has such a gigantic trade deficit with Canada - at this point, well over a billion dollars a WEEK. Quite a lot of that is cars.
You can choose to count GDP any way you want, but everyone else counts it the way I’ve described, and the fact remains that the auto industry is HUGE in Canada, not “nonexistent.” The cars are made here, the parts are made here, the money’s made here and the wages are made here. It’s a primary economic engine for this country.
OK. Stop harping on about the auto industry and get back to proving that the auto industry is the biggest industry in “the first world,” when my cite suggests it’s nowhere near the biggest.
Cool. Then I concede that they have cars in Canada.
McLuhan relied a lot on hyperbole. You’re right inasmuch as he exaggerated wildly. But he did have vision, and it would be inaccurate to say he was “dead wrong.”
Going back to what Bryan was saying in Post #12, maybe now we can get back to defining “information.” For instance, when you turn a lump of metal into a piston are you adding information? And if so, and because the manufacturing costs of an automobile are vastly greater than the costs of raw materials (junk a car and see how much your raw materials are worth on the open market), isn’t the lion’s share of the price of a car be in information?
Your example is terrible, especially if you want to stop talking about cars. But in a general sense, yes, exchange of information is a huge part of any industry anymore.
Not to pile on, but I’ve also got to disagree with your stance. Yes, at bottom there are often physical objects that are bought and sold. But you’re ignoring so much. For instance: while MicroSoft distributes CDs, is their main business anything but information production? What about stock analysts (never mind things like future markets which are one-off from the physical goods)? In fact, I’d think you could include any analyst/research group as mostly information brokers, from Gartner research to Cato to firms doing environmental impact reviews to marketing/polling research. How about the “legal industry”, if you’ll allow me to call it that? Then, as others have brought up, there’s the advertising industry. Yes, there are the glossy mailers, slick TV ads, etc., but there is also lots of “information trade” underlying them. Not to mention the academic world, which I’d think can be characterized as close to a pure example of information trade.
It seems to me that your example of purchasing a car and then limiting it to the physical hunk o’ metal you receive is placing an inappropriate constraint on what is involved in producing said car. Furthermore, I think that while it may be a good example to bolster your argument, there are many other industries (and more of them) that lean severely the other way.
With that said, I sure would appreciate it if someone could go over the meaning of “The medium is the message” for me, as I still don’t get it. (This has been bugging me for some time now; I’ve just never made the effort to look into it.) To start, take this quote from xtisme’s Cecil quote:
Yes, the method of “message” delivery (or presentation) affects how we receive said information. It even seems obvious to me that some methods are more appropriate to yield a desired effect. But I don’t understand the “never mind the content” part – is it pure hyperbole? Is it a statement regarding how undiscerning people can be? Is it a philosophical take on how much our environment affects our thinking (and therefore, our view of ourselves)? Or is it, in a reflexive manner, utter bullshit?
McLuhan was more interested the effects of media environments than the actual content. One way to read that is to say “never mind the content, for the sake of this discussion, I’m far more interested in how the media itself changes people.” As an example, take iPods. You have a bunch of commuters listening to their iPods. They probably all have different taste in music, but the way they are downloading, shuffling, and enjoying music is quite different from the way people previously experienced music, and the growth in popularity of digital music is likely to transform the music industry and… if you want to be McLuhanesque about it… transforms music itself inasmuch as music is an experience, not a thing.
Extension/Enhancement - the iPod extends and enhances the ears
Closure/obsolescence - the iPod amputates the ears and makes radio obsolescent (at least music radio. Witness the “Jack” phenomenon as music radio tries to stay relevant).
Reversal - consider podcasting. I can easily see where “pushed to its limit,” people would download (maybe amateur, maybe professional) podcast musical programs and abandon the time-consuming self-programming.
Retrieval - music is music. No need to explain.
I hope that clears things up. There is hyperbole involved, but it is also interesting to look at how any new technology changes the world and indirect and unintended ways, and one way to do that with media technologies is to set aside the content for a moment and look at the nature of the medium itself. Whether you’re watching reality TV or not, TV is veoyeristic. Whether you listen to country or rap, the iPod is a self-programmed radio station. Etc.
Again, let me restate a simple question, or a thought experiment if you will; how much money do YOU spend on actual physical things, as opposed to information? Be honest. Feel free to split a product between what percentage you think is information vs. material.
Heck, we’ve already had a list of U.S. industries by revenue posted in this thread. Go ahead and go through the list; it’s overwhelmingly NOT the transfer of information.
Information-based business is sexy; Microsoft is famous, especially among computer-literate people. Really, I’m not ignoring that stuff, but I am perhaps a bit more aware than others at the zillions of business that make stuff that people seem to take for granted. Maybe they’re more subdivided and so you don’t notice them; hardly anyone thinks “You know, the plastic injection moulding of screw-top bottles sure is a multi-hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars business,” but it is.
This is not to say I would not question that information is a larger portion of the economy than once it was, but… well, I’m not even sure about that. Maybe it’s true. Possibly.
What about stock analysts (never mind things like future markets which are one-off from the physical goods)? In fact, I’d think you could include any analyst/research group as mostly information brokers, from Gartner research to Cato to firms doing environmental impact reviews to marketing/polling research. How about the “legal industry”, if you’ll allow me to call it that? Then, as others have brought up, there’s the advertising industry. Yes, there are the glossy mailers, slick TV ads, etc., but there is also lots of “information trade” underlying them. Not to mention the academic world, which I’d think can be characterized as close to a pure example of information trade.
It seems to me that your example of purchasing a car and then limiting it to the physical hunk o’ metal you receive is placing an inappropriate constraint on what is involved in producing said car. Furthermore, I think that while it may be a good example to bolster your argument, there are many other industries (and more of them) that lean severely the other way.
With that said, I sure would appreciate it if someone could go over the meaning of “The medium is the message” for me, as I still don’t get it. (This has been bugging me for some time now; I’ve just never made the effort to look into it.) To start, take this quote from xtisme’s Cecil quote:
Yes, the method of “message” delivery (or presentation) affects how we receive said information. It even seems obvious to me that some methods are more appropriate to yield a desired effect. But I don’t understand the “never mind the content” part – is it pure hyperbole? Is it a statement regarding how undiscerning people can be? Is it a philosophical take on how much our environment affects our thinking (and therefore, our view of ourselves)? Or is it, in a reflexive manner, utter bullshit?
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I readily concede that the amount of money I spend on material goods exceeds what I spend on information products, although I don’t have a good idea as to how to determine percentages of things like television, insurance, or even groceries. Of course, that’s a skewed viewpoint; you could take a thousand people like me, total their expenditures, and not come close to the expenditures of a single data-analysis corporation. On a broader scale, I don’t know how to assign percentages to industries. Take “Big Pharma”; while they manufacture drugs, how much of it is research and development (surely, an information-based component)?
I looked at the table. It’s useless for these purposes – not because the information isn’t there, but because it’s not summarized. I’m also not quite sure how to read it; on a cursory glance, it seems that industry 51 (information) is the largest at $891,845,956, followed by industry 441 (Motor Vehicle and parts dealers) at $804,541,685. Do those numbers include the sub-categories? I don’t know. What are the totals by category? I don’t know. How does one classify something like “Air Traffic Control”? Again, I don’t know. Furthermore, if you go to the “Quick Reports” section, they explicitly say that manufacturing is excluded. I’m at a loss as to how to resolve this…
I downloaded the data into a spreadsheet, and the top three by revenue were insurance, information, and auto sales in that order. What exactly is meant by entertainment, I don’t know.
RickJay’s problem is partially that he’s just thinking about the end consumer – himself. The information industry is largely “b2b,” and there’s no way to judge the extent of that business based on personal purchases. Unless of course you are Dio, who buys a lot of “information” (or should I say “infr0mation”?)
