Information soil: November 18, 1996 issue of New Thinking

November 18, 1996 New Thinking:
Information soil

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November 18, 1996

Information soil

By Gerry McGovern

Dirt is cheap and water is free. Both have more value than gold.

Imagine a world made out of solid gold. Imagine a dead planet.

For cyberspace to become an environment within which life and commerce can thrive it needs its soil and water. It needs its basic ingredients which allow growth, sustenance and variety.

What are the basic life ingredients of cyberspace?

One of them is ‘information soil.’ This is the information at the core of our daily existence, often ignored, as soil is, because it is so common. It is local information, local culture, local history and legend, local business, local science, local invention, local everything.

Historically, the vast majority of this information has resided locally, often hidden to the very locals who lived beside it. Often ignored and perhaps even derided by the locals, who have been fed on mass media, on mega stars and mega events. Who have felt that what is local, what they grew up with, what their bones know, has no real value.

But it has. Because local information is the soil of cyberspace. Because everyone is a local somewhere. And in this age of the globalization of everything, people are recognizing that the cake of the global villager is not as wholesome as the bread of the local.

We are at the beginning of the digital age, where information is the resource out of which our new industries will grow. However, the amount of information which exists in digital form is minimal in comparison to the amount of information that actually resides in the world: in libraries, in offices, in bedroom drawers, in minds, in shoe-boxes full of memories.

Let’s describe the information which exists outside of digital form as ‘information rock.’ Digitizing it will turn it into information soil.

But how to turn this giant mass of information rock into information soil?

The answer lies largely outside of the traditional publishing channels which up until now have controlled the flow of information in the world. The answer lies in allowing the local to publish what is local. The answer lies in training school children, students and those with local knowledge, how to research, organize and carry out the digitization of the information which is local to their parish or neighborhood.

Right now, cyberspace is like a barren field, with small tufts of information soil, surrounded by masses of information rock. The Aran Islanders -- natives of barren, rocky, treeless islands -- turned many rocky fields into soily pastures by hard and patient work.

Now is the time for diligent work that will turn information rock (books, texts, etc.) into information soil. This is an exercise which must happen in every local area, and must be driven by the motives of community spirit and future prosperity, rather than that of immediate profit.

However, there will be significant and immediate benefits of such endeavors: education and training. By working with the rock and turning it into soil, people will fashion new tools, will feel the soil grow around them, and will thus develop many of the skills required to till the new soil, to grow the future abundance of digital age information crops.

Gerry McGovern

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Right now, cyberspace is like a barren field, with small tufts of information soil, surrounded by masses of information rock.