The Semantic Sphere 1: Computation, Cognition and Information Economy

Chapter 6

The Information Economy

The information economy is generally understood to mean a particular moment in economic development (the knowledge society or the economy based on knowledge and innovation) or a particular sector of the economy (research and development, communication, education and training, cultural production, etc.). What I am calling the information economy here represents a much broader process. The semantic information economy indeed includes the traditional information economy, but it is not limited to one period or one sector, nor does it stop at the boundaries of the monetary economy. In fact, it encompasses the economy of meaning in its inexhaustible totality and the complexity of its circuits. When he describes the dynamics of exchange in certain primitive societies, Marcel Mauss, one of the fathers of anthropology, is actually speaking of this semantic economy: “Everything − food, women, children, property, talismans, land, labor, services, priestly functions, and ranks − is there for passing on, and for balancing accounts. Everything passes to and fro as if there were a constant exchange of a spiritual matter, including things and men, between clans and individuals, distributed between social ranks, the sexes and the generations”¹. I propose to model this semantic information economy as a circulation of symbolic energy flows (Mauss’s “spiritual matter”) in the channels of the IEML semantic sphere. As we shall see, these flows are regulated by “collective ...