Valorising the Cultural Content of the Commodity: On Immaterial Labour and New Forms of Informational Work

Information Goods

An economy can be differentiated from other sectors of society by virtue of its focus on the organized production, distribution, exchange, and consumption of tangible and intangible goods. The economic value of tangible goods, e.g. food, clothes, a house, derives from their physical properties; while the economic value of intangible goods, e.g. a book, film, a computer program, derives from the value of the informational content that they contain. An important implication of the difference in value is that physical, tangible goods are rival; while informational, intangible goods are non-rival. Rival goods are goods where their consumption by one person necessarily diminishes the capacity of a second person to consume the same goods. One person’s consumption of an apple for example necessarily diminishes the capacity of a second person to consume the same apple. In contrast one person’s reading of an e-book does not necessarily diminish the capacity of a second person to read the same text. My reading of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare in digital form does not necessarily diminish the capacity of another reader to read the same text. Additionally my digital copy of The Complete Works is also non-rival in a secondary sense, in that once the initial digital copy is created further copies of the same text can be created at negligible cost. This is in contrast to the resources needed to produce additional items of tangible physical goods.