Brampton Factor: You call this an information society?

Martin Brampton debunks the idea that we live in an information society - and even if we did, he says, it wouldn't provide all the benefits everyone keeps saying it will.

We are often told that we now live in an information society. This claim is highly suspect, and depends on a technical, and largely meaningless, definition of 'information'. And what about the often cited corollaries - the claims that information is power or that information is immensely valuable?

Something is obviously wrong given the conflicting nature of the claims. The World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) asserts that it is promoting a "people-centred, inclusive and development-oriented information society ". This is quite plainly alien to any idea that information is power, which would be anything but inclusive. Asserting that information is of economic value likewise undermines such universal sentiments.

Indeed, the WSIS has a positively utopian view of the information society. It envisages the eradication of poverty and hunger, universal education, the elimination of major diseases and the solution to environmental problems. As if that were not enough, it also expects a more peaceful, just and prosperous world.

But what is it about information that could have such dramatic ramifications? Unfortunately, when we investigate what the WSIS is actually talking about, we are brought down to earth with a bang. It seems that the kind of information that is going to wreak such wonderful transformations is the same information that we find in the clumsy expression 'information and communications technology'. Would that mere computer folk really had it in their hands to solve all the world's problems!

The kind of information that goes with technology is really a rather specialised notion. It relates to theories of communication established long ago, notably by Claud Shannon, who published his most influential paper in 1938. Shannon's work has important applications but it has nothing to do with the quality of information, a vital consideration for its practical usefulness.

A lot of spam nowadays includes a paragraph from a book. I find it quite entertaining, since my old fashioned mail reader usually fails to render the image that is the spam advertisement, showing only the fragment of a story. Some of them are quite interesting. From Shannon's perspective, the stories are information but to the spammer they are simply a device to evade anti-spam measures.

More seriously, Google is showing serious signs of degradation. Google relies on bibliometrics, the assessment of documents on purely external measures, such as citations. This approach has recently been popular among higher education administrators, who cannot assess the quality of published papers but rely on how often other academics cite them. It is not an entirely reliable method of evaluation for various, fairly obvious reasons.

And it seems to me that Google is slowly losing the battle against websites that seek to exploit the mechanistic approach to assessing information. It is more and more difficult to find the information you're looking for because of the barrage of shopping sites and page generator sites. These sites have demonstrated skill at getting high up in Google's search results, despite the fact they frequently contain absolutely no information that is relevant to the query.

So the idea that we have a lot more information at our disposal and that we can use it to solve a wide range of problems looks suspect, to say the least. Maybe the claim that information is the key to power stands up better? Immediate impressions are not promising.

The obvious bearer of power is government. Recently, the Home Office, which has power over all kinds of matters to do with life and liberty, has had to repeatedly admit it has only the vaguest notion of what is going on. It hardly seems plausible to suppose the Home Office derives any power from its skill at information handling.

When the nation goes to war, or faces violent insurrection, the situation seems no better. The authorities make much of the 'intelligence' that is their exclusive prerogative. But it has become obvious that this kind of intelligence is mere technical jargon, just as electronic information is not necessarily informative.

For instance, we are now entitled to believe that the mass of people who marched in London against war in Iraq were actually rather better informed than the Prime Minister - despite the latter's access to the so-called intelligence. And the Metropolitan Police's use of intelligence is likewise looking highly dubious. It is a matter for great concern that unreliable information is combined with laws that allow the detention of citizens without trial.

Perhaps the most alarming aspect of all this is the notion that information has value. An immediate concern here is that it is often the withholding of information that seems to have value. We hear much of intellectual property rights these days but the grandiose language struggles to mask the reality of conventional power linked with financial strength.

Originally, copyrights and patents were introduced not so much to give anyone a right to protect their ideas but to benefit society through incentives for innovation. Nowadays, the correlation between the exercise of so-called intellectual property rights and innovation is weak, if it exists at all. Indeed, the frequently cited fear is that copyright and patents aid in suppressing innovation.

It is in the nature of things that software developers will often create similar solutions to problems. It is far from obvious that the first to solve a particular problem should have anything like a patent right over its subsequent use.

Returning to the more general issues of society, there is little sign of widespread distribution of worthwhile information. In many fields, both in business and government, 'modernisation' consists of finding ways to take skills away from workers so as to transform them into ciphers who work according to rules laid down for them. This is no longer confined to the deceptive simplicity of manual tasks but is rapidly extending through areas once thought to be skilled. Likewise, little value is placed on experience, part of which is characterised as skill in making effective use of raw data.

Before we get too carried away by the alleged novelty of our information rich society, we should bear in mind that Samuel Pepys was thrown into depression by the state of his voluminous papers. We may be wiser to follow the motto of the seventeenth century diarist John Evelyn, "omnia explorate, meliora retinete" (look into everything, keep the best).