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    Information Wants to Be Shared
    Information Wants to Be Shared
    Information Wants to Be Shared
    Ebook135 pages2 hours

    Information Wants to Be Shared

    By Joshua Gans

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    About this ebook

    Stewart Brand famously declared, Information wants to be free.” Except he didn’t (not really). And it doesn’t.

    Information is much more complicated than that. What information really wantswhat makes it more valuable, useful, and immediate, Joshua Gans arguesis to be shared.

    Using the tools and logic of information economics, Gans shows how sharing enhances most information’s value. He also shows how the business models of traditional media companies, gatekeepers who have relied on scarcity and control, have collapsed in the face of new technologies. Equally important, he argues that sharing can revive moribund, threatened industries even as he examines platforms that have, almost accidentally, thrived in this new environment.

    Provocative, intriguing, and useful, Information Wants to Be Shared will change the way you think about your ideas and the media you use to consume and produce them.

    HBR Singles provide brief yet potent business ideas, in digital form, for today's thinking professional.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarvard Business Review Press
    Release dateOct 2, 2012
    ISBN9781422190470
    Information Wants to Be Shared
    Author

    Joshua Gans

    Joshua Gans is a professor of strategic management and the Jeffrey S. Skoll Chair in Technical Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management. He has authored numerous books on innovation, including The Disruption Dilemma (MIT Press), Prediction Machines (HBR Press), Innovation + Equality (MIT Press), and Economics in the Age of COVID-19 (MIT Press). He is the chief economist of the Creative Destruction Lab and vice president (economics) of the CDL Rapid Screening Consortium.

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      Book preview

      Information Wants to Be Shared - Joshua Gans

      http://pressbooks.com.

      Preface

      Many in the publishing industry have felt compelled to turn to the written word to describe how digital technologies are affecting their lives. To me, an economist, the range of views seem to go from, It will all go back to the good old days as people realize what they are missing, to panic or celebration at the destruction of old institutions. All seem misplaced. This profound transformation is not something for either complacency or intense emotional reactions. The question to me is, have digital technologies really changed anything about supply and demand for writing? It’s become easier to produce (write) and easier to consume (read)—a combination that usually adds up to long-term health. The problem for the industry is that the new ease of reading and writing also eliminated the barriers that had protected it from competition.

      What seems to be missing in all of this froth is perspective. There is no recent guidebook to show us how to look at information industries and work out what do to in the face of drastic technological change. As I wrote about these issues, [1] however, a theme kept on cropping up: the technologies seemed to afford opportunities for consumers and creators to share information and to do so without the permission of some gatekeeper. Gatekeepers used to facilitate sharing, but readers became frustrated when gatekeepers asserted rights that prevented sharing. Gatekeepers (in this case, publishers) in the meantime justified such actions as a means of preserving their position before the digital revolution. So, if new digital technology is enabling sharing, I began to wonder if perhaps that was the point all along. In the predigital world, sharing was costly, which obscured just how important it was.

      Sharing, as it relates to information these days, is hardly a phenomenon lacking for discussion. Indeed, the whole notion of Web 2.0 or social networks is centered around the idea. Consider Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s famous 2008 prediction:

      I would expect that next year, people will share twice as much information as they share this year, and next year, they will be sharing twice as much as they did the year before. That means that people are using Facebook, and the applications and the ecosystem, more and more. [2]

      Consequently, it should be no surprise that Zuckerberg built an entire business around a technology that made sharing easy. And in 2012 his company paid an unprecedented $1 billion for another business (well, really, an app), Instagram, that made sharing even easier. Just as technology entrepreneurs do not seem to have lost money betting on Moore’s Law, I suspect in the future we might say the same about information providers with respect to Zuckerberg’s Law.

      But this book is not about Facebook, Web 2.0, or social media. I want to emphasize the oldness in sharing more than make any claim to newness. From this point on, I will refrain from mentioning social at all (until that is, in just one chapter, where I am forced to confront it in evaluating news media). Instead, this is a book about information goods and the business models that can commercialize them.

      The style of this book is speculative. I aim to collect myriad thoughts about the information economy and to develop a hypothesis based on a unified theme. The discussion is loose and neither formal nor comprehensive. My goal here is to provoke thought and discussion. Much of what I discuss is theoretical—I’m an economic theorist after all—but that theory has power in dissecting what is going on. Moreover, I can use that theory to crank technological assumptions into the future and make some predictions about what will be valuable and what won’t be.

      Many people have contributed to my thinking about these issues. Scott Stern and Fiona Murray, two of my academic coauthors, took me on a journey to understand how and why scientists share knowledge with one another. The Sloan Foundation, whose research program I am codirecting to further investigate this phenomenon, has also been formative. Other collaborators, including Simon Anderson, Susan Athey, and Emilio Calvano, challenged me to think more deeply about advertising associated with information goods. I am grateful to my time at Microsoft Research (New England) in 2011 that provided the genesis for these thoughts. Discussions with Avi Goldfarb and Eric von Hippel have been invaluable. And then, finally, I want to acknowledge my blogging co-collaborators at Digitopoly.org, Erik Brynjolfsson and Shane Greenstein, as well as my Harvard Business Review blog and now this book’s editor, Tim Sullivan, who provided the opportunity to develop key ideas, many of which have carried straight over to the pages here.

      1. Both in my academic research (research.joshuagans.com) and on blogs (e.g., digitopoly.org).

      2. See http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/06/zuckerbergs-law-of-information-sharing/.

      1

      Introduction

      In 1905, a then obscure Swiss patent examiner published a paper that revolutionized physics. The paper’s motivating issue was how to observe simultaneous events. As it turned out, the issue of simultaneity and, indeed, how to guarantee that two events were observed at the same time had perplexed many, none more than those in charge of running railroads. In the decades previous, many collisions could be traced back to scheduling problems and a lack of consistency in the time registered by clocks in different locations. And as engineers and inventors struggled to work out ways of synchronizing the clocks in different locations, they filed patents with their designs and proposed solutions. It is entirely plausible that for young Albert Einstein—the patent examiner in question—the patent office job was not merely a way of keeping him employed but a source of inspiration. [1]

      The surge in demand for information about the time had occurred because of the increased interconnectivity of locations worldwide. Time was no longer something required solely for local schedules. Instead, information on the time needed to be shared internationally. The problem that confronted Einstein and others was how to secure agreement on what the time was. One central clock holding the time could do the trick, but they did not want a monopoly on timekeeping, especially since that clock might fail. So Einstein worried about how to garner that agreement and, as he worked out how information about the timing of events could be shared, he realized that time itself was essentially a matter of perspective.

      The story of time is one of shared information. Information on the time is of little value if only one person knows it. And for that reason, unlike other bits of important information, it does not seem to occur to people to keep time to themselves. Perhaps that is why we so freely give the time when someone on the street asks us for it.

      But this same story tells us that a lack of technology to enable sharing can impede it. The innovations at the turn of the twentieth century enabled sharing that allowed for worldwide coordination. Einstein may have demonstrated that, at some fundamental level, the technology would never get there, but for all practical, earthbound processes, shared time became a reality. [2]

      All That Glitters

      Fifty years earlier, a combination of distance and accuracy had plagued another geographic movement: the shift of people and equipment to California to participate in the Gold Rush in 1849. From the routes themselves to the ability to secure supplies to the speed of travel, forty-niners demanded information. Knowledge could and did make or break their ventures. And if they got to California, they required yet more information, from maps and local knowledge, to seal the deal.

      So how was accurate and timely information distributed when there were no electronic means of communication? Richard Stillson, a George Mason University historian, has documented much of the Gold Rush information that survives and paints a portrait of an old-fashioned struggle to overcome communication constraints and a very modern struggle to sort the credible from the incredible. [3] Not surprisingly, guidebooks were essential for westbound travelers, and publishers seized on the new demand. One of the most popular early on was Edwin Bryant’s What I Saw in California. Bryant, a Kentucky newspaper editor, traveled to California in 1846 with a group that included the Donner Party. Bryant missed being trapped by snow in the Sierras and was able to return the next year to write of his experiences. When the demand for information soared in 1848, publisher D. Abraham and Co. realized the value of Bryant’s account and published several expanded editions with appendixes that included more from Bryant himself. The reputation of the author made the sale.

      A flood of similar books followed, but their credibility waned. Moreover, the demand for more immediate news trumped older accounts; leading newspapers got into the act of hunting for information to report back East. This proved very difficult and the newspapers cribbed shamelessly from one another. The process was further compromised by trailhead towns, which, eager for business, planted copy that maximized their own attributes and decried competing towns. The result was chaos. Similarly, rumors of faster routes spread by word of mouth, generating still more hardship for

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