Epilogue

We don’t really believe everything we have written in this book. However, we have done our best to make our case—more precisely, to make several cases: • Information should emerge from the shadows as a crucial topic in its own right. • Information alone can be a powerful agent of change in the world....

Where Does Sustainability Information Come From?

Introducing sustainability information for consumer products can be accomplished through regulation, international agreements or by the marketplace itself. Large-scale purchasers, like Walmart or the federal government, have enough market leverage to bring forward sustainability information. Once it is available, the information will help make the global market more efficient and more responsive to important human values.

Corporate Transparency

Corporations exist in an odd information space, requiring detailed public reporting and simultaneously allowing enormous secrecy. Financial reporting, however, does not paint a full and meaningful picture of corporate activities. Several straightforward changes to financial reporting can make them much more meaningful and useful to investors, analysts, regulators and the financial world in general. More robust changes to information on products can make the market system as a whole more efficient.

Information and the Market Economy

The Soviet Union tried to manage the information needed to run a centrally-planned economy. Their efforts failed in large measure due to information shortcomings. Capitalism is a much better information processor, relying on the ‘invisible hand” to recognize and respond to market signals. But capitalism can have information failures too, as evidenced by Enron, the subprime mortgage crisis, and the work of information economists.

Openness and Secrecy: The Essential Tension of Government-Held Information

Governments collect and create enormous amounts of information, some of which is publicly available, but most of which remains hidden from view. In addition to information marked secret, there are vast government records that are public in principle, but unavailable in fact. Revelations of multiple mass surveillance programs have shaken the public’s faith, but such programs are not likely to be scaled back. To reset the balance, government information should be more widely available to the public by adopting a policy of hypertransparency.

Introduction

If one accepts the conventional wisdom that information is power—and there is no reason not to accept it—then our Information Age is really the Age of Power. Even in view of the slipperiness of such terms (both ‘information’ and ‘power’ are hard to define), it is abundantly clear that new information tools have multiplied human capabilities many times over. Information spurs participation in new forums and more active engagement in existing ones. It drives commerce, empowers the disenfranchised, promotes participation, creates opportunities (of both noble and crass varieties), and results in new societal arrangements between information haves and information have-nots....

Finding Things Out: Foraging for Coherence in the Information Age

Online resources are rapidly replacing our traditional mechanisms for retrieving information, calling for new strategies for “information foraging”. Like all foraging strategies, we try to optimize by developing rules of thumb for maximum results with minimum effort, a task made more challenging by the fragmentation of the Internet. New information tools will assist human decision-making and in time, may replace it in some fields.

Information as a Policy Tool: The Toxics Release Inventory

The Toxics Release Inventory, created in the aftermath of the Bhopal poisonous gas tragedy in India, is a cornerstone of the environmental right-to-know program in the U.S. TRI is the nation’s first program to use information as an explicit tool of public policy. The program incorporates several novel features, but does not require companies to reduce toxic pollution. However, the “report card” aspect of publicly-available information has spurred substantial reductions nonetheless.

Information: A Brief Modern History

“Information” has taken on new meanings and new significance in the Information Age. The subject has moved beyond the traditional realm of engineering. Encyclopedias and text books that formerly ignored information as a topic now give it a major presence. However, we still overlook the central importance of information itself, focusing instead on information technology.

Tools, Power, and Participation: Information in the Decades Ahead

“Information is power” is true, at times, but not universally so. The trends in developing technologies and strategies will influence the relationship between information and power in the decades ahead. Positive results can come from new assistive technologies in fields like medical decision-making, or from everyday applications like wearable technology. Advances can promote citizen participation, but can also lead to additional fragmentation and privacy concerns.