Information Sharing and Withholding Games

Gossip and chat churn out more information than what one reads and assimilates. It has been confirmed, time and again, that information from such informal, oral and inter-personal sources within ones own organization, particularly peers, is enormous and rich for practitioners. Information is everywhere ('knowledge' is the new label) and lot of it, relevant or not, sought or unsought, is freely shared with others. Relevance itself is not a simple property when it comes to information, as one man's information could be another's noise. Seeking and sharing information (or knowledge-exchange) simultaneously implies withholding it, at least selectively. RTI Act is an extreme case of forcing a system (not individual!) to share information. Inquiries into the reasons and supportive conditions in a dyadic communication where two persons exchange ideas and information reveal that a `psychological cost' is involved when one seeks useful information from another. These inter-personal contacts, built basically on `reciprocity', have many impediments. Apart from semantic and physical barriers, which technology could easily overcome, personal and socio-psychological barriers are vital and quite difficult to break.