Knowledge is not inherently valuable and only spreads through motivated transmission

From The Impact of Media Censorship: Evidence from a Field Experiment in China by Yuyu Chen and David Y. Yang.

One of the great, often unstated assumptions of the digital era is that increasing access to information is to increase the use of information. On a long enough time scale, perhaps that is true. But in human time scales there are reasons to question the assumption. People do things because they are motivated to do so based on some perceived value.

We all of us have essentially infinite access to the air we breath but we use it no more than we have to for breathing. It is an imperfect analogy but highlights that context matters and that just because something is accessible doesn't mean it will be used.

Chen and Yang are looking at the effectiveness of censorship but their findings, I think, go to the larger issue of whether access leads to use. From the abstract:

Media censorship is a hallmark of authoritarian regimes. We conduct a field experiment in China to examine whether providing access to an uncensored Internet leads citizens to acquire politically sensitive information, and whether they are affected by the information. We track subjects’ media consumption, beliefs regarding the media, economic beliefs, political attitudes, and behaviors over 18 months. We find 4 main results: (i) free access alone does not induce subjects to acquire politically sensitive information; (ii) temporary encouragement leads to a persistent increase in acquisition, indicating that demand is not permanently low; (iii) acquisition brings broad, substantial, and persistent changes to knowledge, beliefs, attitudes, and intended behaviors; and (iv) social transmission of information is statistically significant but small in magnitude. We calibrate a simple model to show that, due to the low demand for, and moderate social transmission of, uncensored information, China’s censorship apparatus may remain robust for a large number of citizens receiving unencouraged access to an uncensored Internet.

Their conclusion is that access alone is insufficient to increase information use but requires both motivation and some catalytic initial event. Once started, interest in access and use of information grows organically. Interestingly, in the context of their experiment, social transmission of acquired knowledge was relatively weak, probably because the high cost in an authoritarian system of "illegal" knowledge as well as, perhaps, tightly bounded affiliative groups characteristic of low trust societies (a bubble effect).

China is not the world but the experiment is an interesting shedding of light on the fallacy of the naive assumption that information/knowledge is inherently valuable and that all you need to do is increase free access for information to flow. Like so many complex human systems, the answer is that knowledge flow depends on context, circumstance and motivation.

The issue of motivation suggests to me one of the vectors of cultural influence on outcomes. Investments in education are going to be effective only to the extent that the culture inherently values and motivates knowledge creation, access, transmission, and use. Otherwise, knowledge transmission is inhibited and limited to those circumstances where there is direct utility.