Freedom of Information
A brief history from Indian Culture to the Associated Press and Western Big Tech
Infophilia, a Positive Psychology of Information | February 22, 2025 | Vol. 3, Issue 8
✨Welcome to Infophilia, a weekly letter exploring how our love of information and connections can help us all thrive, individually and collectively. 🤗
Cite as: Coleman, Anita S. (2025, February 22). Freedom of Information: a brief history from Indian culture to the Associated Press and Western Big Tech. Infophilia, a positive psychology of information, 3 (8).
Corrections made 02/24/2025:
Added to Notes section on the Associated Press links that clarifies AP’s stance (AP will use both the original name Gulf of Mexico and acknowledge the new administration’s choice Gulf of America) and the media support: 1) January 23, 2025, Barrett (AP announcements) AP Style Guidance on Gulf of Mexico and Mount McKinley; and 2) February 20, 2025, Reporters Committee on the First Amendment, Media coalition to White House: Restore AP access to press pool.
Deleted “smaller” in front of North African forest elephants, in the About the image section. Asian elephants are smaller than African elephants.
Background
You and I are flesh and blood, but we are also stardust. Helena Curtis, Biology (1968)
The long 22-minute read that was last week's essay traced modern information flows through tea cultures and tea trade routes, and compared the market capitalization of the Dutch East India Company and the British East India Company to today's Magnificent Seven, the American Big Tech giants. I did so because the overlap of Infophilia readers with political Substacks isn’t just trivia to me—it reflects a hunger for deeper space-time contexts in our current information landscape. When 25% of Infophilia readers follow Letters from an American, and engage with Civil Discourse with Joyce Vance, The Contrarian, and Robert Reich (15% each), Paul Krugman and Public Notice (13% each), and my top reads are Knowledge Resistance and Restoring Trust, it signals a broader search for meaning beyond algorithmic feeds. This readership pattern, particularly the post-election doubling, suggests a collective desire to understand how we got here—from tea leaves to Twitter feeds—and how to get out!
Infophilia readers are drawn to a history of libraries, information sciences, and knowledge across cultures and societies—stories and research that I enjoy sharing. Last week's essay was a deliberate effort to move us from the muck of the information sewers to the seas so we can be both practical and fly to the stars. I want to take you, dear readers, on the far larger journey of human flourishing. Together, we will move from problems to possibilities, from confusion to clarity, and from rational fear to justified hope equipped by a language that builds. This is why I go beyond just 300 years of European-American history, or even the larger European and Western worlds to draw from our interconnected global human history and civilization. On a personal level, Indian history and Tamil tradition suggests that the antidote to information overload, anxiety, and populism isn't just more information, but a different relationship with knowledge itself and presents an infophilic model; Tamil culture and literature is one of the places from where I'm melding theory and practice.
Alternative title: From algorithmic captivity to a federation of free information
Freedom of Information: A Global Legacy
Freedom of Information (FOI) transcends its modern Western framing of government transparency laws. The human pursuit of truth and accountability has deep roots across cultures: