Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Information overload and futility

I read recently about a guy who is keeping a video diary of his whole life. The idea is to wear a digital video camera and have it turned on permanently, streaming all the minutest details of his life to banks of hard drives. I’m glad technology now allows that kind of (useless and wasteful) stunt. Computers are becoming more powerful and more wearable each quarter, with so many cores, we don’t even know how to program them efficiently anymore. The Internet is bigger, faster and more ubiquitous, roughly 110 million websites these days, and 550 billion web pages in the so-called deep web. Hard drives have come a long way from the 80 lbs beasts they were originally (see them at the Computer History Museum, www.computerhistory.org), offering now 1.5TB in a 3.5 inch format. All those technologies are colluding to facilitate ever more massive data collection, storage, processing and querying efforts. We have entered an age of peta-scale (10^15) computation (IBM’s RoadRunner reached a peak of 1.7 peta-flops in May 2008) and peta-scale data sets which I’m finding hard enough to comprehend (and work with) when the data is meaningful and useful, but downright overwhelming, burdensome and even wasteful when the information is useless. Huge databases of genes and pathogens instantly accessible via the web are undoubtedly a significant progress. But chronicling Joe Schmoe’s life second by second with an always on video stream? In the end, I feel it destroys precious environmental resources, indirectly, invisibly and all too easily from the comfort of your armchair. YouTube has 84 million clips, and 13 hours of fresh videos are uploaded every minute. Are all those videos significant? Do I want to know about the latest silly prank of a teenager who doesn’t have anything better to do? Well, maybe actually. I know people who spy on their teenagers via the traces they leave in Facebook and YouTube. By the way, beware of errors, misinformation and manipulative propaganda when you access all this information. Not everything is accurate or neutral in this ocean of information that the Internet has become. I also have mixed feelings about the iPhone application that allows you to know in real time what your buddies are up to. Do I really want to know? Maybe not. Maybe they can have their life and maybe I don’t have any desire to know what they do each second of their lives. What are we going to talk about when we meet, if I already know everything they’ve been up to lately? Lastly, good old email has also become a prime contributor to information overload. They say the US economy wastes billions of dollars every year when we have to spend (too much) time wading through mountains of not so relevant emails, that were only to easy to generate and send. I have quite a few friends pulling their hair every day because of the hundreds of emails they have to read daily, and I’m not even talking about spam. Technology has made it easier to propagate information, almost too easy and seemingly inexpensive, but we should also think about the relevance of the information we post, and about the environmental footprint of it all.