A People's Summit was held June 11-17, 1995 in Halifax Nova Scotia, in parallel with the Group of Seven's Economic Summit. In conjunction with TOES/US (The Other Economic Summit/US), Information Habitat presented a workshop at the People's Summit.

The theme of the Information Habitat workshop was Ecology of Information: Economic, Political, Social, Cultural and Ecological Opportunities and Implications of Information Technologies. The workshop will be held in the morning of Friday, June 16, 1995. The workshop will be developed on the following premises:

• We are in the midst of an information revolution, of a comparable order of magnitude to the industrial revolution, and likely to be having as profound an impact on all aspects of our lives as did the industrial revolution. The workshop is designed to focus on the opportunities as well as the negative implications of the emerging information technologies and the evolving ecology of information, and to raise questions as to viable political choices concerning the technologies from a sustainability perspective that balances people- and nature-centered considerations.

• The habitat of choice for information is increasingly a computer system, accessible on one's hard drive, via modem or on CD-ROM. Does this herald unprecedented universal access to information and the emergence of a new electronic participatory democracy, or is it creating an increasingly privileged information-rich elite, living ever more in virtual realities disconnected from the fate of a great mass of the world's population that has virtually no ready access to sound information?

• Currently, for those who do have access to it, the Internet - and particularly the World Wide Web - represents a remarkable "global information commons" and there is a deep commitment to the openness of the system among many veteran "netizens"; however Microsoft is about to launch its own proprietary system that could pose a major threat to the Internet. Meanwhile, the G-7 is moving rapidly forward on the development of a "Global Information Infrastructure" - with the U.S. playing a lead role in this initiative - and with goals that appear to put the preservation of interests of information and communication corporations above considerations of universal affordable access.

• In the evolving landscape of an information economy, what are the implications of the fact that the underlying economic parameters of the new information and communication technologies are radically different from those of traditional economics, and tend to favor cooperation over competition? According to microeconomic theory, economic welfare is optimized when the price of a product equals the marginal cost; but the marginal cost of access to information is virtually zero - so that it is mostly intellectual property rights that keeps the price of information and software high, and inaccessible to many.

Participation in the Information Habitat workshop was accessible - in addition to the face-to-face workshop in Halifax - via a "listserv" electronic mailing list, an electronic conference on the Association for Progressive Communication Networks, and on the World Wide Web.

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Go to Robert Pollard

Updated: 2002.03.05