The Times: Op-ed - Will my brain freeze as I search for my life in gigabytes?
GOD IS not actually dead - he simply needs a system upgrade to keep up with Google. By David Rowan
Unlike most Californian cults, the one born six years ago in a Menlo Park garage can now justifiably claim to offer its worshippers an unprecedented degree of omniscience. By offering to archive all our e-mails - along with every image, weblog entry, online chat and web page it can find - Google hopes to be the only information source we will ever need. With a share offering looming, and the "search wars" to be won, no wonder it wants to be the ultimate one-stop data store. But have you considered what all this reliance on digital memory is doing to your real one?
Those of us whose short-term memory has been obliterated by data overload are already Googling far too often when we should be thinking. So habituated are we to this ultimate spell-checker, fact-checker, dictionary and news library that a frozen screen heralds all the neural dislocation of temporary Alzheimer's.
Naturally, we will be delighted to accept yesterday's offer from Larry Page, the firm's co-founder, to store up to 500,000 pages of our e-mails free of charge in a Gmail account. After all, if it helps him to accomplish his declared mission of organising all the world's information and making it easily accessible, that is one more reason to switch off our synapses.
We are already facing enough cultural pressure to out-gigabyte each other. Your iPod holds only 20 gigabytes of music? Pah! You will need at least 40 to be au courant these days, even if you cannot quite imagine where you would find 10,000 songs worth carrying around with you.
In fact, the deluge is only growing: according to a recent study by the University of California at Berkeley, the amount of new data stored on paper, film, magnetic and optical media almost doubled between 1999 and 2002. In the latter year, researchers estimated that 18 exabytes of data flowed through digital channels such as television and the net. "Exabytes"? Keep up: each one represents a million terabytes, which in turn comprise a million megabytes. To put it another way, every person in the world generated the equivalent of 30ft of books. How much simpler the world was when we were limited to the typewriter and the Home Service.
BUT even then, some of the world's greatest technology thinkers were giving warning of trouble to come. In 1945, long before the first text message was sent, Vannevar Bush, who ran the US Office of Scientific Research and Development, proposed the Memex as the obvious solution. This would be "a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanised so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility".
Is Google about to become the Memex? It has, you may have noticed, started archiving the texts of books in recent months - but the battle is far from over.
Microsoft, which along with Yahoo! is fighting to become the dominant search engine, has also been experimenting with vast databases that would chronicle your entire digital life. Called MyLifeBits, the project sets out to solve the "giant shoebox problem" of how to organise years of photographs, e-mails, documents and even phone calls.
As Gordon Bell, one of the developers, puts it: "Imagine being able to run a Google-like search on your life." Such a technology, he suggests, is inevitable as digital memory becomes ever cheaper... and human memory no more reliable.
On the techies' bulletin boards last night, not all the buzz concerned the suspicious April 1 timing of Google's announcement about Gmail. There were also questions about the merits of storing all one's personal electronic data in one place. Already we are being tracked as never before by CCTV cameras, mobile phone stations, and even Oyster cards on the Underground. It would certainly help those conducting the fight against terrorism, but do you really want to put ever larger areas of your digital identity into databases owned by a private company?
That was a rhetorical question, by the way. Owing to the 20 gigabyte backlog in my inbox, I'd really rather you didn't e-mail me with your answers.
(The Times, Comment page, April 2, 2004)
Unlike most Californian cults, the one born six years ago in a Menlo Park garage can now justifiably claim to offer its worshippers an unprecedented degree of omniscience. By offering to archive all our e-mails - along with every image, weblog entry, online chat and web page it can find - Google hopes to be the only information source we will ever need. With a share offering looming, and the "search wars" to be won, no wonder it wants to be the ultimate one-stop data store. But have you considered what all this reliance on digital memory is doing to your real one?
Those of us whose short-term memory has been obliterated by data overload are already Googling far too often when we should be thinking. So habituated are we to this ultimate spell-checker, fact-checker, dictionary and news library that a frozen screen heralds all the neural dislocation of temporary Alzheimer's.
Naturally, we will be delighted to accept yesterday's offer from Larry Page, the firm's co-founder, to store up to 500,000 pages of our e-mails free of charge in a Gmail account. After all, if it helps him to accomplish his declared mission of organising all the world's information and making it easily accessible, that is one more reason to switch off our synapses.
We are already facing enough cultural pressure to out-gigabyte each other. Your iPod holds only 20 gigabytes of music? Pah! You will need at least 40 to be au courant these days, even if you cannot quite imagine where you would find 10,000 songs worth carrying around with you.
In fact, the deluge is only growing: according to a recent study by the University of California at Berkeley, the amount of new data stored on paper, film, magnetic and optical media almost doubled between 1999 and 2002. In the latter year, researchers estimated that 18 exabytes of data flowed through digital channels such as television and the net. "Exabytes"? Keep up: each one represents a million terabytes, which in turn comprise a million megabytes. To put it another way, every person in the world generated the equivalent of 30ft of books. How much simpler the world was when we were limited to the typewriter and the Home Service.
BUT even then, some of the world's greatest technology thinkers were giving warning of trouble to come. In 1945, long before the first text message was sent, Vannevar Bush, who ran the US Office of Scientific Research and Development, proposed the Memex as the obvious solution. This would be "a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanised so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility".
Is Google about to become the Memex? It has, you may have noticed, started archiving the texts of books in recent months - but the battle is far from over.
Microsoft, which along with Yahoo! is fighting to become the dominant search engine, has also been experimenting with vast databases that would chronicle your entire digital life. Called MyLifeBits, the project sets out to solve the "giant shoebox problem" of how to organise years of photographs, e-mails, documents and even phone calls.
As Gordon Bell, one of the developers, puts it: "Imagine being able to run a Google-like search on your life." Such a technology, he suggests, is inevitable as digital memory becomes ever cheaper... and human memory no more reliable.
On the techies' bulletin boards last night, not all the buzz concerned the suspicious April 1 timing of Google's announcement about Gmail. There were also questions about the merits of storing all one's personal electronic data in one place. Already we are being tracked as never before by CCTV cameras, mobile phone stations, and even Oyster cards on the Underground. It would certainly help those conducting the fight against terrorism, but do you really want to put ever larger areas of your digital identity into databases owned by a private company?
That was a rhetorical question, by the way. Owing to the 20 gigabyte backlog in my inbox, I'd really rather you didn't e-mail me with your answers.
(The Times, Comment page, April 2, 2004)
posted by David Rowan at Friday, April 02, 2004
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