From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Telmo Menezes
Sent: Saturday, April 18, 2015 11:30 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Food for thought
Current global growth estimates are that every two days, the world is now
creating as much new digital information as all the data ever created from the
dawn of humans through the current century. It has been estimated that by 2020,
the size of the world’s digital universe will be close to 44 trillion gigabytes
If I take a picture with my smartphone is that counted as "creating
information"?
I suspect it is, but we must remember that not everything that can be counted
counts.
What about the masterpiece that nobody ever sees, hears or reads? I am sure
many great works of thought have been utterly lost and many more have never
been experienced outside of the brains of their creators. Perhaps some
fundamental theoretical work is even now languishing in utter obscurity. Is
this “creating information” or does “creating information” depend on it
becoming consumed (and entangled with other streams of information)?
I find the term "create information" a bit nonsensical, because the only way to
not do it is by being dead. Otherwise, everything you can conceivably do
creates information. It's almost a synonym for "existing", no?
On one level anything that is stored becomes information (even though – I think
we all agree – that by far the greatest portion of this massive stream of
“information” being generated is of small consequence. If it can be gathered,
stored, transmitted, transformed then on one level it qualifies as information
(most information is not useful information)
At a sociological level, perhaps what is more important is a more Darwinian
approach: what information gets copied and how much? The 44 trillion gigabytes
digital universe cited above is a highly redundant repository, where such
processes take place. Most of it, of course, is photos of cats, trivial
personal messages about meeting for lunch and things like that. The shape of
the Eiffel Tower is very successful, and gets copied daily by hordes of
tourists photographing it.
Agreed, by far most of the information being generated is unoriginal by most
measures. An increasing portion of the information stream is not even human
generated. For example the continuous stream of current geo-location data being
slurped up by various corporations such as Facebook, Google, Microsoft, etc. as
well as by local, state, and federal police and security agencies. The reams of
data being generated by rfid chips embedded in products as they travel through
distribution channels and warehouses, floor racks in department stores. This
space is exploding; it is generally called the internet of things, and it
includes all the things that have and are rapidly becoming rfid identified (and
time/geo-located)
The information streams also include all of the machine (algorithmically
generated) metadata and associative data that becomes overlaid over the
original data streams, providing additional context to it and graphing it into
many various orthogonal association networks.
I think it's hard to say if this information storage explosion is good or bad
for the fate of obscure masterpieces. On one hand, it facilitates their spread
once they attain some success. On the other hand, it makes it hard for the
initial success to happen, because there is so much other stuff.
I tend to think it is not so good for the obscure masterpiece. In vast
connected networks of interacting nodes a network effect begins to shape a
topology and well connected nodes tend to accumulate more connections and this
promotes a positive feedback mechanism. The obscure unconnected node is not
favored by this process. The network effect operates in many systems; for
example planetary formation from the circulating whirling disks of small grains
of dust and gases circling a newly forming star system. The nodes (in this vast
circling network of dust grain nodes) that randomly clump into larger masses
will accumulate more nodes of dust at a far higher rate than the lone
unconnected grain of dust. The network effect is an important factor to
consider.
Chris
Telmo.
Chris
Telmo.
Brent
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