What's the point of information?

1-in-30 dollars are spent on communications, yet as Chris Anderson points out in Free!, the value of informaton is completely subjective. Allow me to philosophise with amateur psychology.

What is the point of infromation? Why do we spend so much alone just on the ability to receive information; let alone on the information itself?

I'm reverting to my Maslow construction from an earlier blog:

Information allows us to:

• Get food, shelter and other low-level Maslow needs. Information tells us how to exchange skills/effort we have (work) for those that can make use of those skills/effort (customers). And it tells us how we can get work/skills done for us (sellers) in exchange for the money we received from selling work/skills (shopping).
• Get a sense of well-being. We can be entertained or informed and it makes us feel good. We can read a book or watch a film, and something human about us says that is good. Cats don't enjoy films, unless they are about food. Humans do.
• Get a sense of belonging, which includes sex. Information (or in this case social communication) is a key Maslow objective because humans are social creatures. The niche we evolved into was a social community niche, and our species has evolved to work on this basis. There are animals that don't need social interaction, except for sex; but humans are not that sort of animal. Information therefore, fulfils this.

Of course, companies exist to achieve the delivery of skills and work in a more efficient manner than a single person can do. The construct of company's need for information is different:

• Despite this basic raison d'etre of companies, coordination of all these people, and the ability to consume skills/work before skills/work can be returned back into the system drives the need for credit and credit markets and as such companies need information on how to aquire credit, which requires the business plan etc.
• Companies need to know how to get their skills/work recompensed, which means selling, marketing, advertising and customer identification.
• Companies need to know how to aquire skills/work that is not worth their effort doing in-house. They need to know where to buy from.

The ultimate objective of a company is, because of the credit market, to turn a profit. No company, whether a charity, government organization, sole trader, private or publically listed company, to ensure that the the skills/work they provide has at least the same skills/work that are required by the people within the company (plus the other stakeholders). Putting in terms of money, it means it must be profitable.

So, information has value to companies so long as it meets one or more of teh following objectives:

• it identifies customers (sales)
  
• it enables customers to understand the value of the skills/work they offer; it puts a price on skills/work (value proposition)
  
• it explains to potential (and current) credit providers that their credit is work investing in the company (capex control)
  
• it enables them to identify where to get services (purchasing)
  
• it allow them to create more product for their skills and work (operating efficiency)

What information would these people want in order to achieve these goals -- generically?

• sales advantage is only achieved if it is an advantage. Syndicated information, if ubiquitously used, is not valuable information. Only information that yields competitive advantage is valuable.
  
• understanding a products place in the market is important because it allows sellers and customers to identify a price. The buyer needs to have information that determines what value it will have within their organization. Ultimately, the price is determined by the amount of value that the organization, which includes the intrinstic value [how much would it cost me to do it myself], plus a risk premium, plus a convenience/speed of implementation premium; but less a transaction cost and vendor risk cost.
• since market fails when complicating factors such as 'brand', advertising, poor advertising, false hopes, excessive relationship risk); and in consumer markets this complication is positioned as "large risk premiums", or "high convenience premiums" which because of incomplete information force buyers (esp. consumers) to make irrational decisions, we have entire markets devoted to distorting market prices