It seems that information in the past was very valuable and often closely guarded. Books were hidden away and rare, some to only be read by certain scholars or priests. Secret recipes were common. Magic tricks were closely guarded. I could go on.
Now it seem free information is everywhere and people willingly share it up on the Internet. Some really good colleges even offer some of their classes on line for free. Yeah, you still have to buy some books if they still are copyright protected but some folks for reason I don’t know go out of their way to make books and movies available with ease for people willing to go that rout . You can knock Wikipedia all you like but it is a vast resource of free knowledge. This site is essentially free and and someone is gonna come here and post something relevant without reciprocation, the same with thousands of other boards. Information seems more valuable than ever yet at the same time at a much lower cost. Essentially free.
Why do people go out of their way to share information for no reciprocation? Why the change from the past?
In the past, people who liked to share information had significant roadblocks: religious, economic, technological. They’ve probably always been around, but their effects were limited to their immediate connections.
Nowadays anybody who wants to share can do so for very little time and effort, broadcasting it to the entire world in seconds. Those who want to stop them have to go to extreme measures that are rarely 100% effective.
People who don’t want to share still don’t, but once something goes viral on the internet, it’s impossible to keep it a secret any longer. (See wikileaks, sex videos, redacted gov docs, pirating, etc.) All it takes is one person and some marketing before information becomes irrevocably duplicated and shared among millions.
A lot of it is technology. 800 to 1,000 years ago, if you wanted a copy of a book, you got a scribe to write it out by hand, on expensive parchment. The twin technologies of paper and printing changed that, so 400 to 500 years ago you could go to a bookseller and buy a printed copy, at a small fraction of the cost. Now you go to Amazon or Abe Books to get a much cheaper printed copy, without going to the bookshop, or you go to Project Gutenberg or Google Books and get an electronic copy virtually free.
The main answer is that technology has made it much easier and cheaper to produce and mass-distribute information.
As a side effect, if you want people to pay for your information, you’re in competition with those who are giving it away free.
One other fact is that, in the 20th and 21st centuries, we have the model of information subsidized by advertising. You can watch TV, listen to the radio, read a magazine, read a website, etc. for free or relatively cheap, but you’re bombarded with ads.
First place, if information is shared, you can still use it. If I sell you my house, I can no longer live there. Second, many people (this includes me) are more interested in the honor that comes with having discovered something new than with profiting from it (although I have to admit that probably no one would pay for my discoveries).
That’s the real big reason right there. There’s no money, influence or power in keeping that particular piece of information secret.
Information that gives someone an advantage politically, financially or otherwise is definitely still secret. You don’t see the Colonel’s 13 spices published anywhere officially, just like you don’t see the formula for Coca-Cola published anywhere. It’s also not common to see free novels, music or movies distributed as well, unless it’s either someone making a social/political point, a band that nobody’s heard of and that can’t really expect to make money, or it’s been stolen.
The vast majority of information we see out there for free is either factual information that there’s no real financial value in- what we see on Wikipedia for the most part is the same stuff in dozens of encyclopedias of the pre-internet age that was published freely back then in academic journals, etc… but people paid for encyclopedias not for the information itself, but for an easily digested and well indexed formatting of that data.
I bet it’s hard to find something freely distributed on the internet that someone could realistically expect to make a profit on, where the author or distributor is not trying to make some political or social statement by distributing it free (GNU project, LINUX, several bands, etc…)
Depends what you call ‘information’. It’s true that it’s difficult to hide some information such as how to construct a nuclear weapon, but that’s usually very general information. The details are much more difficult to get hold of. And the details of much more mundane information while difficult to protect are considered extremely valuable. List of credit card numbers, SSNs, and health information are considered extremely valuable and highly (but faultily) protected.
Since there is so much information out there, the money now is in organizing and making sense of it.
For instance, in the legal profession you can look up any case or statute for free, but such information is nearly worthless. However, a treatise or a legal encyclopedia that organizes cases by subject is worth hundreds of dollars.
There is also a shortage of people who know how to analyze information. Most peer reviewed studies get packaged into news stories with conclusions that are only vaguely related to the results of the study. Nowadays it’s more important to find an author who knows what he’s talking about rather than having access to the raw data.
I guess I am really asking, I know it is free but why make a webpage and share it. Why post answers to peoples questions online?
Maybe I will go a bit meta.
Why do the people on this board go out of their way to share their hard won knowledge? It has nothing to do with the cost of a book or mass marketing. If you happen to post on this thread, Why?
What do we get out of sharing even general knowledge. It must be something as stated above there is not much money in it. It does however cost some of your time and possible some cash.
Because we are Apes. We have replaced grooming with talking. We no longer pick ticks. Now we pick brains. We still like to huddle in a circle scratch you behind the ear and eat whatever moves.
On a societal level, evolution favors humans who share information. They build tribes, towns, villages, cities, societies, countries, alliances, etc. and gain strategic advantages over humans who don’t.
These people who like to share have always been around, but their effectiveness had been severely limited by the technology, culture, and economics of their time. Until recently, it was hard to get information out to more than your immediate connections. It is a lot easier today.
Because it’s so easy today, you only need a tiny number of sharers to make the information available to everyone. Using this thread as an example, less than 2% of the users (posts vs views) are information-sharers; the rest are lurkers who simply consume the information. The math is flawed, of course, but the actual ratio probably still leans heavily towards information consumers rather than producers. However, in the age of the Internet, once it’s out it’s out and effectively free. In this sense, information is cheap literally because it IS cheap. It can be distributed nearly infinitely for negligible costs. Whatever societal/genetic factors that may have selected AGAINST sharing (such as piracy laws or censorship) are easily overwhelmed by even a single rogue agent who wants to share. If 4000 people don’t want to share a certain piece of info but a single whistleblower does, the world can know about it within a few hours.
ETA: 5) This board suffers from selection bias. People who want to share drift here and post replies. People who don’t, well, you don’t hear from them.