IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - December 2015 - 64

surrounded by an ocean of water,
yet dying of thirst!
There are three fundamental
reasons why quantity may crowd
out quality. The most obvious is
the production cost problem where
the emphasis on quantity shifts the
emphasis and resources away from
quality. It is costly to produce quality information, and it is difficult to
do both quality and quantity. When
quality does not pay in proportion to its high cost, quantity wins
over. This is also the most common explanation for non-information examples, but explanation for
information products involves two
other reasons. The second reason
is the obsolescence problem. Information is not neutral with respect
to the physical world, but it is an
agent of change. Information is useful precisely because it is used to
change the environment and subjugate nature and society to our purposes. But as information is used
to change the environment to take
advantage of new opportunities,
our existing information about the
environment becomes obsolete,
leading to a loss of information. The
net effect may be positive or negative, but it is increasingly negative
as we will show, in a fast-changing information-intensive society.
The third reason is the competition
problem when information is used
as a competitive weapon against
others, to mislead and confuse others, leading to a loss of knowledge
on their part. Information is power,
because it can be used to control
others and exploit them, by controlling their information sources,
and consequently their behavior.
But replacing reliable information
with distorted and misleading information leads to a net information
loss on their part. More importantly, if everybody uses the same tactics, leading to an information war,
everybody may end up worse off

and in an era of cheap distribution,
mass appeal dominates financial
decisions. Mediocre music with better financial prospects then crowds
out high-quality music. Similar
arguments apply to other information products [6].
Economists have known for
some time that low quality drives
out high quality when it is difficult
to distinguish between them, called
the "lemons problem." When the
marketplace cannot distinguish
quality easily, consumers tend
to buy the cheaper alternative to
reduce their risk. Those who produce high-quality expensive products then cannot compete and
leave the market [9]. Information
products fit well into this model,
because they are notoriously difficult to distinguish in quality, since
there are no obvious markers of
quality information. Examples are
abound. People with most Facebook friends are among the loneliest, because Facebook provides
large numbers of low-quality superficial friendships, but takes away
time from building high-quality but
time-consuming friendships. When
it is difficult to distinguish between
the two types of friendships by not
understanding why one may not
be a good substitute for the other,
the incentives are for developing
the easy friendships with minimal
cost. Lemons problem extraordinaire! People who eat the most
food are not the healthiest, and in
fact they may have serious nutritional deficiencies. That is because
they tend to eat low-quality foods,
since high-quality foods tend to
be expensive and difficult to get
in large quantities, and low-quality
foods may not be a good source
of nutrients in any quantity. Yet,
when the quality is difficult to distinguish, and low-quality foods look
and taste similar to their high-quality alternatives, the incentives are

with significant loss of knowledge
and insight by all. We will describe
all three reasons in detail in the following sections.

Information Cost
The American poet Henry David
Thoreau, upon obser ving the
excruciatingly hard work of laying telegraph lines near his home,
famously lamented: "We are in
great haste to build telegraph lines
from Maine to Texas, but do we
have anything important enough
to communicate to justify this kind
of cost and effort? We are eager to
tunnel under the Atlantic Ocean to
bring the old world to the new, but
the first news that will arrive at the
American ears will probably be that
Princess Adelaide has the whooping
cough!" He probably would have
made the same comment about the
Internet [14].
Information is costly to produce, especially quality information, but cheap to disseminate once
the infrastructure has been built.
Modern communication networks
reduced the cost of dissemination
drastically, but producing quality information remains costly. As a
result, the incentive is to emphasize
cheap dissemination rather than
expensive production, by producing large quantities of low-quality
information, but disseminate it
widely. This is the explanation for
the celebrity culture where some
people succeed on the basis of
name recognition alone, without
any particular accomplishment; yet
those with extraordinary accomplishments often remain obscure,
poor, and unappreciated. Consider
musicians. Quality music is very
costly to create, and there are very
few composers and song writers
who produce high-quality music.
They often live in obscurity because
high-quality music rarely has mass
appeal for large scale distribution,
IEEE Technology and Society Magazine

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december 2015

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - December 2015