Technologically Induced Social Alzheimers

David Pogue has a nice little piece called "Why We Make Home Videos" on the NYT website. It's basically a personal tale in defense of home videos, but he starts out reminding readers of something he's written about a number of times, data rot.

Data rot is the tendency for technology to evolve so fast that we are all left with lots of information stored on media for which there no longer exist a device to play it. The implication of this is that society as a whole "has" lots of information that it might have no way of accessing. Hence the title of this post. Of course the ironic thing is that the social problem is hardware outstripping the memory while in the personal case its sort of the hardware failing the memory.

But it points to an interesting idea: perhaps the explosion of information -- and our general capacity to store, move, and process it -- comes with some self limiting counter tendencies. One is complexity -- too much information, no one has the synoptic view or cleverness to understand what it means. Another is the connect the dots problem I've written about here. Yet another is data rot -- backwards compatibility always has its limits.  I wonder if anyone has sat down to map out what sorts of information are likely to move into the darkness of rot when.  Are all the data on punch cards gone from the social memory yet?  How about all those 24 inch fixed disk platters we used to get mounted on our System/370 machine?  I know my college thesis on it's 8 inch IBM Series/1 diskette is basically lost to time.  What else?



Related Posts
"The More Information the Better"?
What Society Knows

Three Kinds of Information Sensitivity

OK, a naive meditation on three modes of paying attention to the world.

Pretend you are a politician, perhaps a senator or member of congress. What do you pay attention to?

Some would have us believe that poll numbers are the most important. You open your mouth, emit a sound bite, the media disseminates it, people react and respond to polls, and you adjust accordingly. Depending on your point of view, that's either democracy in action or appalling pandering. In either case, the opinions/reactions of "the people" are aggregated via some presumably reliable and accurate method.

Another theory would be that you are listening to powerful interests who have your ear and who donate to your campaign. Your comments are probably a little more proactive than reactive -- they've let you know what they want to hear and so you make sure you say it. But as above the whole thing is a cycle -- we get the initial attention by saying things and then it cycles from there. In this case, though, the method for aggregating the reactions (and pre-actions) of donors is harder to suss out. Tally up the dollars? Is there a pecking order? Or a "one topic each" rule?

A third approach would be that you apply accepted methods of policy analysis and make use of trustworthy data to decide what policies would best achieve desired aims. Here information is aggregated and decisions made using generally accepted (and open) methods. Of course, deciding on those aims is an information problem that can bring us right back into one of the first two approaches, but we'll set that aside for the moment.

My guess is that a system COULD run on any of these three approaches to information processing. What presents a challenge to govern-ability, though, is when one or more of these is the public face of what's going on while another one is what's going on behind the scenes. Or, worse, when the actors themselves don't really have a handle on when they are using one or another to try to ascertain how to govern.

And yes, this could be seen as an attempt to translate direct democracy, some variation on aristocratic pluralist democracy, and technocracy (help me on the terms, polisci friends) into information terms.

New Digital News Outlet from KALW

This week KALW is launching its new local digital magazine to complement their broadcast work.  The new site has a way for community leaders to plug in and help them do a better job of reporting on the arts and other community events and issues.  Users can become "community correspondents".  Check it out, help them tell others about it and together we can do a better job of becoming the media we want to create.

Here's the magazine: http://www.kalwnews.org/

This is the community page: http://www.kalwnews.org/community

And here's their FB group to stay in touch: http://www.facebook.com/pages/KALW-News/195280839624

Great Info Blog and Interesting Sounding Conference (NY Feb)

Check out Graham Webster's excellent blog for some insightful essays on topics not unrelated to those I'm writing about here. It's called:infopolitics/

While reading through that blog, came across mention of an interesting conference to be held in February at the New School in NYC: Conference on Information Flow Restrictions at the New School. It actually had me looking at plane ticket prices and thinking "whom do I know that I could stay with...." If you know how little I like to travel during the semester, you get the idea that I was intrigued.

Those damn unconnected dots again (rough draft)

An article in the Times, under the headline "Obama Says Plot Could Have Been Disrupted," reprises the metaphor of "connecting the dots" to describe different pieces of information having been in different heads, but never getting put together in one head that could make sense of them.

It is reassuring that Obama's speaking bluntly about organizational performance rather than riding roughshod over the constitution, but, as argued in an earlier piece ("Mind the Gap"), the idea that it's a simple problem of dot connecting is a basic misconception.

How do you hear "connect the dots"?  One version is reminiscent of a detective show or Agatha Christie novel; the challenge is to assemble hints -- pieces of information that, alone, are not conclusive proof of anything -- in such a way that the "answer" emerges as a sort of logical necessity.  The "logic" is in the mind of the beholder, but that's all.

A different version is reminiscent of the we draw lines between stars and come up with "constellations."  Two things are important.  One, the stars are not really next to one another -- the viewer is the one who sees them as points on a plane and interpolates and extrapolates the other vertices of the figure.  Two, there's no there there -- the crab in cancer or the warrior in Orion has to be brought to the observation by us.

The first requires us to have all the pieces on the table and be open to what they "tell us" when seen together.  The challenge for intelligence agencies is to put the information from various sources onto the same table.

The second requires us to decide what to pay attention to and what to ignore (left), how to connect and not connect (middle), and what to add that's not there (right).

If we increase the degree of information sharing we fill up our field of view with more and more points and the dots get harder and harder to connect.

On the other hand, if we ask the different agencies to filter the information then we are back in hot water because none of them know what they are looking for.

The president was furious about the failure of the system to see "the red flags" and intelligence agencies are reported to have said that the information they had was "vague but available."  The problem is that flags are not, in general, a priori red.  Presumably, some smart people are thinking about how systems see and things like that; hopefully, they don't just think of it as "connect the dots."

We observe with some irony that the actual policy response to the problem -- at least the response that's been announced -- is in fact to gather more information via increased screening.

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Oh, and if we look up "connect the dots" in Wikipedia you get a short article about a children's game. It bears a Wiki-warning: "This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards."

Who Uses That?

As the year wraps up I'm going over unpublished drafts of posts.  Came across this one from September that hints at (or at least resonates with) the posts on "infermation."

In our bathroom stands a toothbrush stand and in that toothbrush stand stands a gum stimulator.  It is/was mine, but I rarely use it.  It's basically abandoned property -- to the point that I sometimes look at it and wonder whose it is.

I was looking at it today and had a "take the role of the other" moment.  I wondered what other members of my household made of the gum stimulator.  I felt pretty sure that they (OK, I'm talking about one person in particular, so "she") took it to be mine;  she knows it as "Dan's gum stimulator."  There is no way she can detect the change in the object's status -- the fact that it's become an abandoned artifact, that I look at it and don't know whose it is (but at some level I remember because I haven't yet thought it was hers)  -- because if it is used, or rather when it was used, it was used in private.  Her access to the object is the same as it ever was: "not mine, only one other person routinely uses this bathroom, must be his.").

This started me thinking about the general category of things that are in plain sight, but about which one has no direct, experience based knowledge of who uses them or what they are used for because they are used by whoever it is that uses them out of our purview.

Those keyboxes at various locations in office buildings.  The number tags on utility poles.  Spray painted numbers on streets.  

This brings up a series of related socio-epistemological categories.  Equipment that's used out of sight and generally kept out of sight, is closely related to the above.  Perhaps we need a distinction between the mysterious (stuff that you just don't know who uses it how for what) about which one could become curious, but usually does not, and stuff that you presume is used by particular others for perhaps known purposes (though, in fact, like my gum stimulator it might be used for nothing by no one).  Then there are the things that I know are yours but I have no idea what you do with them (tools, perhaps) and am just comfortably ignorant.  Another category might be things that are superficially shared but that embody some of the secret side of the other.  And so on.

The point, I think, is related to Simmel's observation that one can never know the other entirely.  That's one of his a prioris of the human social condition.  This extends to objects which we know (or suspect) to be objectifications of subjectivity (made by, used by, related to) without fully grasping the subjectivity they embody.

More...

Information about Infermation

Alas, it turns out that I (and my Bangalore colleague) may not be able to claim coinage of the term "infermation" as introduced in a recent post.  The term shows up in 2004 in LexiconWiki, a wiki for playing a variant of the Lexicon Game.  The initial definition there is different from ours:

Infermation is what we can know about something from reports of that thing.

since our definition distinguished three categories: (1)  information derived from experience,  (2) information derived from the experience of others (and reported to us and taken as the case because of trust in the provenance), and finally, (3) that which can be inferred from either of these by the application of some sort of logic -- infermation. 

But they add an interesting twist as their definition continues:

Infermation is most commonly available about long lost texts, and the pattern of human history means that many sources of Infermation are several generations removed from the thing under examination.

You may rightly be getting suspicious of this source as it is starting to sound odd (and it gets odder), but, let's do note that there are some things that would fit both definitions.  Two examples that come to mind are proto-languages and "ur-texts."  For historical linguists, known languages and the logic of linguistics allow us to infer the existence of proto-indoeuropean, even though no examples have ever been found.  Similarly, we sometimes posit the existence of a never found "ur-text" that must have preceded some known text.  So far so good, but their definition starts to head off into other directions after this,  progressively verging on nonsense (in the conventional, not Wittgensteinian, sense):

Sources may, obviously, vary a great deal, ranging from direct assessments, both academic and popular, of the thing in question, to notes and references, index lists, bibliographies, catalogues and assorted general remarks. The acceptance of Infermation as valid and valuable has allowed academics to make many advances that would otherwise have been impossible. The Infermatic industry, which first flourished on Alphas, has grown throughout the academic community, promoting and assessing the use of Infermation and producing dedicated Infermatics for both academic and general consumption. [read more]

From there the 2004 source veers more and more off the road.  After intense scrutiny, my confidence in our (re-)coinage has returned.  Maybe I should have typed "infermation tm"