Production of the food that we eat and the products that we buy has been globalised at a staggering pace. In an age of transparency and instant access to information, why then do we know so little about the factories and farms that make the things that we consume?

A central facet of our contemporary global economy is the fact that consumers are usually only able to see commodities in the here and now of time and space, and rarely have any opportunities to gaze backwards through chains of production in order to see how a commodity was made.

This detachment of material goods from information about the production of those goods allows many multinational companies to conceal production practices that are harmful to workers or the environment behind veils of distance. We don't have to look far to see the many ways in which companies adorn their products with images and narratives of smiling workers, harmonious communities, and healthy natural environments. But we are rarely able to know how reflective those narratives are of on-the-ground realities.

There are isolated cases in which the media have performed a spectacular job in deconstructing corporate narratives and bringing issues like child labour and poor environmental management to much of the world's attention. Companies like Shell, Apple and Gap have been forced into altering their production practices by such exposés.

However, there are limits to this kind investigative journalism. Stories about child labor in clothing factories sells papers. But less sensational stories about irresponsible corporate practices related to the more mundane everyday objects that we surround ourselves with are less likely to garner attention.

We therefore need to ask what the global economy would look like if information about the production of commodities could be reattached to material objects. Would an increase in transparency change how consumers act? And more importantly, would a lack of opacity in production chains make companies less likely to engage in distasteful or unethical practices?

These questions are more than just a hypothetical construct. A combination of smartphones, fast mobile networks, an explosion in user-generated content and the fact that almost 30% of the world is now online offers the possibility for a new kind of globalisation: a globalisation of information that would theoretically allow consumers to learn more about the things that they buy. In other words, it might now be possible to begin constructing an Internet-based framework that would allow user-generated content to be shared about any node on any conceivable production chain.

It isn't difficult to imagine a multilingual, mobile-accessible framework that would allow anyone to submit information about wages, pollution, corruption, animal welfare and any number of other topics. In fact, there are already a handful of projects that aim to do exactly this.

Howstuffismade.org, for instance, is a compelling visual encyclopaedia of the production processes of everyday goods. Ethiscore.org, a project run by the group behind the Ethical Consumer magazine, is similarly designed to rank companies based on a range of criteria that can be customised to each person's ethical, political and environmental preferences. A more open and user-generated approach is being attempted by the charity Wikichains.com (a project that I currently manage). The site uses a wiki-framework to allow anyone to submit content that exposes distasteful production practices of any commodity or product.

But will this kind of information-driven consumer activism work? Will new technologies and technological practices be enough to effect both social and economic change?

There are certainly potential problems. First, there is the issue of reliability. Open platforms invite distorted representations from both corporate sources and overzealous consumer activists. However, the experiences of Wikipedia and other projects that rely on user-generated content demonstrate that a combination of detailed guidelines and active communities can eliminate a lot of inaccurate content.

A second issue relates to the fact that there are always distinct geographies of user-generated content. Research has shown that your typical creator of content is most likely to be a young white male in a wealthy country. Hardly your typical farm or factory worker embedded in a global production network. The information shadows of objects will thus always be densest in the most highly networked parts of the world.

These issues don't mean that user-generated content does not offer significant opportunities for information about the chains of commodities to transcend barriers of time and space. There is now the potential for a democratisation of spotlight effects that were formerly offered by a much smaller set of infomediaries.

What this all means is that reattaching information to material goods as they traverse our planet can bring about a new kind of globalisation. Consumers could make more informed economic decisions and be more aware of their economic, social, political and environmental impacts. Producers could have a powerful platform to speak out against human and environmental exploitation. And most importantly, an increasing amount of international trade could be driven by understanding and compassion rather than branding and exploitation.

Mark Graham is a Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute and manages the Wikichains.com project. He blogs at ZeroGeography.