According to Gleick, the impact of information on human affairs came in three installments: first the history, the thousands of years during which people created and exchanged information without the concept of measuring it; second the theory, first formulated by Shannon; third the flood, in which we now live. The flood began quietly. The event that made the flood plainly visible occurred in 1965, when Gordon Moore stated Moore’s Law. Moore was an electrical engineer, founder of the Intel Corporation, a company that manufactured components for computers and other electronic gadgets. His law said that the price of electronic components would decrease and their numbers would increase by a factor of two every eighteen months. This implied that the price would decrease and the numbers would increase by a factor of a hundred every decade. Moore’s prediction of continued growth has turned out to be astonishingly accurate during the forty-five years since he announced it. In these four and a half decades, the price has decreased and the numbers have increased by a factor of a billion, nine powers of ten. Nine powers of ten are enough to turn a trickle into a flood.
NASA/JPL-Caltech
The cover of the ‘Golden Record,’ stowed aboard the Voyager spacecraft and sent into space in 1977. This ‘message in an interstellar bottle,’ James Gleick writes in The Information, contained the first prelude of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier and other samples of ‘earthly sounds,’ such as ‘the clatter of a horse-drawn cart and a tapping in Morse code.’
Gordon Moore was in the hardware business, making hardware components for electronic machines, and he stated his law as a law of growth for hardware. But the law applies also to the information that the hardware is designed to embody. The purpose of the hardware is to store and process information. The storage of information is called memory, and the processing of information is called computing. The consequence of Moore’s Law for information is that the price of memory and computing decreases and the available amount of memory and computing increases by a factor of a hundred every decade. The flood of hardware becomes a flood of information.
I love the idea here that Moore’s law – stated in 1965 – signalled the start of the flood of continued growth in hardware and that forty years later it would be used to understand the flood of information: the flood of hardware becomes the flood of information. Sounds a bit deterministic: the more memory we have, the more we use …? But if we look at the statistics it seems to apply. Memory capacities are soon exhausted. New memory is constantly demanded. Why is this though?
On a personal level I’ve always been content to have what I need and no desire to exceed that need. Of course needs change but I’ve always been way behind the latest, fastest, biggest-memory device. And a lot of the need to change/upgrade has been driven by the computer industry’s need to make money. So the 512 mac mini I use is beginning to struggle with the latest, obligatory, upgrades in web browsers, iTune software, and various other bits and pieces that you don’t realise you’re using until you realise you can no longer use them because they’re not compatible with the operating system in the machine. Maddening. I’m not actually doing, or wanting to do anything different. But no, you’ve got to upgrade to a later operating system, but you can’t do that until you’e upgraded the memory, and to do that you’ve got to get everything off the hard disk in order to do a re-install. So, I have to buy a portable hard drive to store photos and music that I would normally have, and will have when it’s back with a new operating system, installed on the computer’s hard disk. I don’t need a big portable disk … I have maybe 10 gb of stuff. But I can’t buy one which is smaller than 80gb. I wonder what I’ll do with all that extra space ….?
The question here is, what’s driving what? Information is constantly expanding – and has been expanding in amount and complexity since the big bang. It’s no different now. But what is different is the need to capture that information. Exactly what I’m doing now. Capturing this bit of information in a way that I can return to it and recycle it for use in another bit of writing. A great priviledge but also pretty wasteful.
Will we ever get to the point where the ethical imperative will be to avoid storing stuff on the web? A greener solution being to just keep it to yourself – in your mind and not the mind-of-the-cloud?
Save the planet – JUST REMEMBER WHATEVER IT WAS YOU WANTED TO STORE AWAY.