Some titles in portuguese, you can translate to english:

BRIGGS, Asa; BURKE, Peter. Uma história social da mídia: de Gutenberg à Internet. Rio de
Janeiro: Jorge Zahar, 2006.

BURKE, Peter. Problemas causados por Gutenberg: a explosão da informação nos primórdios
da Europa moderna. Estudos Avançados, 2002, vol.16, n.44, p. 173-185. Disponível em:
http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0103-40142002000100010&lng=en&nrm=iso.
Acesso em: 9set.2010.

_____________. Uma história social do conhecimento: de Gutenberg a Diderot. Rio de
Janeiro: Jorge Zahar, 2003.

_____________. Informationalism, networks and the network society: a theoretical
blueprint. The network society. A cross-cultural perspective, 2004, p.3-45. Disponível
em:
http://annenberg.usc.edu/Faculty/Communication/~/media/Faculty/Facpdfs/Informationalism
%20pdf.ashx. Acesso em: set.2009.

DANIEL, D.R.Management information crisis. Harvard Business Review. Harvard, 1961,
vol. 39(5), p.111-121
.
DAVENPORT, T. H. Ecologia da informação: por que só a tecnologia não basta para o
sucesso na era da informação. São Paulo: Futura, 1998.

WELLER, T. Information History an introduction: exploring an emergent field.
Oxford: Chandos, 2008. Disponível em:
http://www.emeraldinsight.com/Insight/ViewContentServlet?Filename=/published/emeraldful
ltextarticle/pdf/2760590410.pdf. Acesso em: set.2010.

You’ve articulated what I’ve thought for a long, but have never remotely clarified or expanded upon like you have. My take is that we’re in an incredible age of turmoil, when the old-guard, centralized institutions are clashing against the newer, more agile, decentralized “networks”. At the heart of this clash is something that is, for the first time in human history, a burgeoning reality. No longer do the large institutions – government, corporate, media – have full control over the source, medium and content of the message.

However, they will not go down without a fight. A perfect example is all the nonsense related to the financial markets. As a trader and professional in this arena, I know, for a fact, that all of the key financial and economic information released by the government is false. They are vastly underreporting key figures in an attempt to dress things up and put a positive spin on them. I believe they’re doing this because this is what they’ve always done – except now there are hordes of bloggers and tweeters following their every move and reporting alternate versions of it.

I follow groups of professional traders and financial experts everyday on Twitter and the reactions to everything Obama, Geithner, Bernanke and Congress says is unbelievable. Not one person believes it for a second – and they tweet it to thousands of followers hundreds of times a day.

Having said that, I think we’re at the beginning of this clash and like any period of change, I believe that it will be very tumultuous. At its heart is the power to influence the masses. For the first time, elected officials, the media and corporate leaders must actually account for what they say and do, because they no longer control the spin, and by not controlling the spin, they no longer retain exclusive control over their influence messages.

Influence isn’t a bad thing. All of us use it in some form or another every day. But with the rise of the Web and social media, we have many more messages and many naysayers.

As this clash relates to the global economy and geopolitics, I highly recommend two books.

The first is called “The Age of the Unthinkable” by Joshua Cooper Ramo, and the second is “The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age”. Both can be had on Amazon.

I’m very much looking forward to digging into your book.

Best,

Pete

thanks for the comment.