The Information Age The past We grew up in a different world, as different as Europe and Asia. It was a world where it was easy enough to get a basic education. It was difficult to break through the cultural and financial barriers that stood between every child and higher education. The services of highly educated people were in short supply, whether they were doctors or lawyers or accountants. There was not much trade in intangible services, and not many to be had. What trade there was was mainly local trade. When information was packaged, it was packaged in books and newspapers, tangible forms with all the limitations of tangible commodities. It was a world in which the composition of the population had changed because antibiotics and fertility control had stopped women and children dying like flies. It was a world in which the ability to move chattels across distance had changed. Tractors, refrigerated trucks, trains, planes and metal ships like buildings were pushing out the clipper and the steamer, the bullock teams. School children knew they were part of the British Empire, and that all courts led to the Privy Council. Trade was trade in tangible commodities. Quantity in tangible goods is limited. It is limited by the amount which can be produced, the amount which can be stored, and the distance across which it can be transported. Goods move in one direction. The courts thrived as the ability to beat distance stepped up trade in goods. "Wogs" began at Calais, and anywhere else where the court writs did not run. Other official forms of dispute resolution mostly withered away. When we first began to go to Bordertown, most of the civil disputes were local disputes. They arose out of local transactions. Most trade was local, even if the produce was being exported. The present We work in a different world. In places like Bordertown (obsolete link), towns which grew up at transport hubs, the memory of that world is a more than a living memory. It shapes the expectations of the people living there. Now the Internet has come to town. Bordertown has a new spoke in the transport hub, a spoke linking it to the world where intangibles are traded. People will learning to use new technology which they will bring into the courtroom with them. There is no longer a single common law travelling with the goods all the way along the trade routes. No court is an apex. There is no modern "Pax Mongolica". These are new limitations, fetters on the Australian judges and magistrates which did not manacle the judges and magistrates who preceded us, who went to Bordertown. Not only have we been confined to our own shores, but most of us are confined to our own states. Within one nation, most of us work in one or another of seven different countries. Bordertown shows us a working unit stripped clean of the dross of a sophisticated economy, and it shows us what we are not doing. We are not expanding as we were when Judge Gwynne went to Mt. Gambier in 1862. He took advantage of the technology of his time; he sailed in by ship, through the waters of one of the most dangerous coasts in the world. He overcame distance, the barrier of the day. Information as a commodity But the biggest change is the change in trade. Information has become a commodity. It is constantly traded. In this new trade, the dollar cost of transport is a measure based in time instead of a measure determined by distance. Unlike goods, information does not move in one direction. When Judge Gwynne went to Mount Gambier, when the magistrate goes to Bordertown, information flows from the community to the court. We cannot hold a virtual court in Bordertown until we find a way for the community to tell the magistrate what the community wants the magistrate to say on its behalf. The magistrate can be trained to appear in Bordertown by camera, but can Bordertown be trained to get its message to the magistrate? In this new age, courts can become commodity dealers. At this conference, you have had a paper from one of a potential new customer. You have learnt how Dunn and Bradstreet, merchantile agents, are selecting packaging and transporting information. If you have not already thought of it, ask yourself this: are the merchantile agents buying from courts information which they are storing, packing, and transporting? The new trade is quite different to the older forms. The resource is infinite, not finite. What is sold is not what has been produced. What is sold is a selection of data taken from the whole of the data that has been produced. What is sold is a time saving, a saving of the time it would take to acquire the same information using old methods. More information can be obtained for the same expenditure of time, just as more acres could be ploughed in the same time when the farmer used a tractor instead of a horse. Information is sorted and stored and transported using information technology, just as fifty years ago apricots were loaded on to trucks and driven to market along rough tracks through gorges in mountains, just as bags of wheat went on to the dray at the back of bullocks, to be hauled away through the dust and the flies. Information commodity disputes. Does the information belong to the person it came from, or does it belong to the owner of the data base, who "value added" by storing many single pieces of information each coming from a different person? Or does it belong to the person who took extracts from the whole of the information and packaged it in a way which was useful to yet another person? Is the argument about "privacy" really an argument about whose needs take priority within the context of a limitless resource? Do we protect the information in one of Chris Kania's cartoons, or the packaging? As he works at holding a mirror up to our nature, of supplying information about ourselves and our world, is he in the business of saving us observation time or is he in the business of saving us the time it would take us to draw a different cartoon containing the same information? The answers are not easy, but someone is going to have to find them. And someone is going to have to try to implement them. If we do not find ways to deal with them we are heading backwards down the road, to Niall's Saga, the saga where an entire family burned in the flames ignited by what began as a trivial dispute. The Althung tried to mediate, but their efforts were in vain. Restoring certainty to trade along the trade routes, confidence that traders and their families will be protected from 'con men' and brigands, has been a function of government, but for the people of Bordertown it is so dysfunctional that they assume it has gone the way of whale oil and car horses. In towns like Bordertown, the courthouse is not marked on the town maps. There is not even a street sign to show the way. Into the Information Age The virtual court may not be able to keep information flowing from Bordertown to the magistrate. Alone the magistrate cannot deal with the needs of Bordertown. Perhaps it is time for courts to use technology to work together as one unit in virtual court rooms presided over by two judicial officers each competent to hear the matters in their own jurisdictions. If they can reach common ground, it will not matter if the parties cannot, if the same order can be enforced in both jurisdictions. |