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.

TV sucks

We don’t have TV anymore! We should celebrate. We canceled our subscription to cable TV, and yesterday evening at 9:10 pm, the curtain fell and it was over. It was long overdue. I couldn’t stand the commercials anymore, and the sheer stupidity of most programs. I didn’t want to pay for a bundle that included QVC and other nonsense. I would have paid for a few select channels, like PBS, the History channel, and maybe TCM. But they don’t sell TV that way. Talking about the programs, the other day, I was shocked to see how insensitive the commercials can be. It was in the middle of Intervention, and the family of an alcoholic was trying to rescue their beloved one (OK, it is strange already that this kind of situation can be made into a spectacle), but zap! a commercial for Kentucky Fried Chicken cut in! I was disgusted. It didn’t make me feel like eating KFC at all, by the way. The channel probably sold the wrong time slot to KFC. In any case, I don’t want to pay $60 a month for that kind of crap, I have better things to do with my life and my money.

Culture of fear

I’m tired, and nothing works at the office today. I like Fridays though, I tend to be productive on Fridays, much more so than on Mondays. Mondays don’t work for me. Anyway, I was reading the news yesterday, and came across that tidbit in the warning ahead of Hurricane Ike: “Persons not heeding evacuation orders in single family and one or two story homes will face certain death.” Somebody went overboard at the National Weather Service, apparently. Maybe they are inflating the language just to make sure people get scared and evacuate. Then this morning I heard a report on NPR about Ike: in a dramatically raspy voice, the reporter was saying “if you wanted to hit the US where it hurts the most, you couldn’t choose a better spot”, talking about the oil refineries in the path of the hurricane. I guess you needed some forward looking imagination to try and come up with something scary that time: Ike is now only a category 2, after all. I think we live in a culture of fear. On CNN, in between news about hurricanes and other disasters, they now have segments about survivors of various tragedies: how Mrs X. survived a shark attack, how Mr. Y spent two months on a drifting iceberg in the middle of the Atlantic, whatever, as long as you get scared next time you board a plane or a ship. In fact, cultivating fear in the audience is a bona fide genre on TV, with series on mega-catastrophes, and ads that tell you (in black and white) that you could suffer from disease X or Y in the future if you don’t (buy now! and) swallow (in color) their drug. Culture of fear and culture of violence too actually, where some make the argument that if everybody was armed, nobody would get hurt. That will be the topic of another posting. In the meantime, I’m canceling my cable TV subscription, and I’m very careful about how much radio I listen each day, even NPR. It’s on the Internet too, but it’s easy for me to discriminate there and not be taken by that culture of fear. I’m wondering what it says about the country in terms of psychology and sociology. And who benefits from that climate of fear? Is it the various merchants who peddle their drugs in the ads? Ah, I know! Yes, fear sells. Probably because it suppresses thinking. The only good consumer is the non-thinking consumer. If fear suppresses thinking, let’s use fear to turn the masses into good consuming masses. Or is there something deeper? Well, I have to watch out not to fall into meaningless generalities. Not everybody is afraid all the time, for sure. But it’s in the media, that’s for sure too.

9/11

Such strange times. It’s 9/11 today. The country is at war, yet here in the Silicon Valley, you couldn’t notice it. Except that there are more defense related contracts, and that’s good for business, I guess. In fact, people are still very much into materialism. A new line of iPods was released on Wednesday. At the coffee shop next to the office this morning, I noticed so many iPhones. There was a geek, no doubt thinking he was so cool, who couldn’t help but touch the iPhone on his hip every now and then. While he was ordering his decadent triple-latte-no-foam-with-room-on-top, he caressed the precious jewel 3 times in 1 minute, I counted. Should this poor soul seek help for some form of an obsessive disorder? He is not alone, unfortunately, although usually, the severity of the disorder is less acute. At the office, almost everyone has now ditched their previous cell and bought an iPhone. What for? Me, I’m thinking about a $60/year pay as you go plan, no thrills included, no Internet, no text, nothing. I don’t use my cell, except for emergencies. I don’t care about the latest gadgets. The iPhone is definitely very cool, but I don’t need it. Or if I had one, I would spend too much time playing with it at first, then that would pass, and then I would start wondering why I spent so much money on the device. And I would have a hard time reconciling my behavior with what is going on in the rest of the world. Our world is so fractured. There is a lot of misery, yet here we bathe in materialism and nobody seems to care what is going on elsewhere. It feels so strange to me.