Digital Exhaust
The New York Times technology page reports that tech researchers calculated that the world last year generated 161 billion gigabytes — or 161 exabytes — of digital information made up of photos, videos, e-mail, webpages, instant messages, phone calls, and other digital content. The calculations strike me as so much wishful thinking, based on conjecture and assumptions, but it does raise an interesting question anyway: What does this deluge of information mean so us, living as we do in the Information Age?
The effect is hard to to assess just yet, as we’re still in the knee of the acceleration curve. Like the impact of TV, it will probably only be revealed in hindsight. Still, even from this vantage point, it’s relatively easy to observe that the ease of creating, copying, and distributing digital information means that a large percentage of that information is mindless chatter, utter ephemera, or mere machine-to-machine instructions. In other words, it’s just so much digital exhaust. For example, one of the most frequently trades bits of information is the current time, usually millions of computers logging into time servers to sync their clocks.
The din of information exchange presents real and largely unrecognized challenges to human value. It used to be, for instance, that the average person met and got to know perhaps 200 people in the course of a lifetime. By necessity, those relationships had continuity and context. Today, we meet tens of thousands of people in a lifetime — many of them virtually (digitally, not in meat world) — and have continuous relationships with almost none of them. Human relationships are now so fluid that they often have little gravity or meaning. Another example is that digital copying has transformed the music industry and rendered its viability suspect. The RIAA is now an institution under siege to reconsider its hard-line approach to piracy and protecting its marketplace. Even further, the Wiki phenomenon threatens to essentially deauthorize information, making information itself fluid and unreliable.
The availability of cheap and abundant (and meaningless and contextless) information sources is a Faustian bargain, of course, though most people are so blinded by their technophilia that they can’t and won’t recognize what they are trading away. What’s at stake is in fact our entire epistemology. When our means of gathering, processing, and using information undergoes a fundamental shift to dominantly digital forms, so, too, will the knowledge that stems from it shift. We’ve already seen it in microcosm when our governments lie to us and we absorb the propadanda directed at us, drawing faulty conclusions (and accordlingly, acting foolishly). The difference will be that no one will be coordinating the transformation to a new epistemology. We’re unwittingly creating a future we can’t anticipate and won’t even be able to recognize.
