This may be a stupid question, but does anyone of the esteemed economists on the list know where I would find a systematic and rigorous analysis of "information as a commodity" ? I just read Michael Perelman's book about class warfare in the information age, which contains a lot of very valid points which I had not thought of so precisely before, but I want to delve deeper into it, which is what a writer like Perelman really invites you to do. I thought perhaps somebody has already written a profound analysis of it. I recall vaguely that Kenneth Boulding wrote a piece on "information as a commodity" but wondered if somebody else had not gone much deeper into it.
It strikes me that informationn is a peculiar commodity because its use-value and exchange value can vary enormously in a very small interval of time, and often you cannot tell what its true value is beyond what its supplier asks for it or what the buyer is prepared to pay. Different types of information commodities do appear to have some kind of regulating price but it is not a clear-cut production price. Questions also arise about the real subsumption of information under specifically capitalist relations, the extent to which this can be accomplished given that crucial information often resides in people's heads, and that bourgeois society generally accepts that one's body is one's private property. It may be very difficult to assert private property rights to information, and so on. Information which spreads rapidly to the masses of the people loses its exchange-value rapidly and so on. The issue is also related to the question of capitalistically productive labour. Marx never really specifies exactly the region of capitalistic commodity production within which productive labour is performed. All he really does on the subject is to say that the division of labour is more and more modified to bring it into conformity with the specifically capitalist method of production, regardless of whether this is healthy for human beings or economically rational from an overall perspective. From this we get the long-run "law of motion" that capitalism transforms more and more labour into capitalistically productive labour. All we really get from Marx about the concept of the commodity itself however is the idea that the commodity has a value, an exchange-value and a use-value. The value is abstract labour, the exchange-value is expressed in money sums and prices, and the use-value resides in the physical properties a commodity has (not its utility in the eyes of the consumer(s), Marx has in mind an objective social use-value existing independently of individual consumers). We can further elaborate by saying the commodity must be able to be exteriorised or externalised, it must be able to have an independent existence and be separable from the owner or producer. Also, it must be possible to apply private property rights to the given use-value, somebody must be able to own it and be able to trade it. This means that there are many use-values such as maybe "air" which are difficult to convert into a commodity, all you can really do is designate "air space" and regulate emissions into the air etc. (even here there are problems, such as Bill Rosenberg pointed out with his example of sheep farting and belching). The question then arises, is Marx's conception of market economy really adequate, or does it not really fully capture what commodity production is about ? To what extent can information really be a commodity, or is it a fictitious or fiducary commodity ? We could find some interesting paradoxes, relating for instance to whether the information in somebody's head is a commodity or not, and under what circumstances. Could it be that information economics decisively changes the way we think and act about commodity production and the division of labour ? How does modern information technology change our concept of what it means to engage in trade ? Is the live transmission of information a commodity or is it only a commodity as a "package" with a price tag ? What is the real "pathway" of the capitalistic development of information economics, and what are the laws of motion of information economy ? If all economy reduces to the economising of labour time, is this still true in an information-rich economy, or do we have to apply criteria such as the speed at which we can obtain the required information in the required form, and transmit it to the appropriate person at the appropriate time ? This is the kind of stuff I am thinking of (I could write lots more but haven't the time). Anyway if anybody can supply any references to substantive literature on this topic I would be very grateful (I don't mean the Manuel Castells type of stuff but real thinking about information economics as related to the commoditisation of information). Thank you in advance, Jurriaan
