An Information Economy

This chapter focuses on the ways of knowing that surrounded objectivity, which established highly probable facts despite a world in constant change. This appreciation for things and their descriptions gave substance to the culture of taste and objectivity and was in turn built on the sociable interactions of exchange. Like the values of taste and consumption, exchange began from the precise knowledge of things that came via personal experience, but it also included the ability to transform one value into another. Methods of exchange, then, also had fundamental implications for establishing the value of certain kinds of knowing, turning information into knowledge. One of the social analysts of a century ago, Georg Simmel, underlined the changes induced by the process of exchange. All human relationships involve exchange of one kind or another, he noted, for even in ordinary conversation something is exchanged.