John Miedema

Information Quake, Pt. 2

I come to these essays with a Generation X perspective. I identified as a reader in the days before digital computers went mainstream. In those days, being a geek meant being bookish. Teenage fun meant the acquisition of a new science fiction or fantasy novel to read that night. Being young and open-minded, I was equally ready for the information age. I was writing programs a decade before the web was introduced, and the early web was not exactly a garden of good reading material. These days, I scan about 200 feeds a day, slowing down to read articles that catch my interest. I still find myself asking if the reading available on the web compares at all to old-style reading of print books. Many would easily say no, but if that is true, why do we find ourselves reading the web more often that books? Is there something about all that quantity that translates in quality?

Another qualification for geek-hood when I was teen was the playing of chess. In my mind, the essence of chess was not simply learning combinations, but mastering strategies. In the early days of computing, chess programs were designed to show how machines could think. In Behind Deep Blue, Feng-Hsiung Hsu describes how he built the chess computer that beat the world’s chess champ, Kasparov. I was deeply disappointed to learn that the program did nothing that resembled thinking. It simply used high powered servers to crunch through as many combinations as possible. Again it seems that sufficient quantity can have emergent quality.

In Dreaming in Code, Scott Rosenberg described how in the early days of computing, programmers were diligent at writing the most efficient code possible because computer time was quite expensive. In modern times, computer time is cheap and programmer time is relatively expensive. Processing power has been found to comply with Moore’s Law which states that processing power will double every two years. As Rosenberg points out, “Chips may double in capacity every year or two; our brains don’t” (pg. 69). In the long run the quantity of processing power wins out over the quality of efficient programming.

Old-style reading of books is all about quality reading. But I ask again, why do we find ourselves reading more frequently on the web than reading books? What is the siren call? Someone recently told the Soviets had a saying that sufficient quantity has a a quality all its own. It is as if from the mass of tidbits and snippets on the web, it is not merely a horrid puppet of quality that is being raised to mimic quality, but there is something real, worthy to steal a reader’s best attention.