John Miedema

Offworld, Pt. 2

We are in the middle of an information race. The cultural impact, at least, is as significant as the arms race of the eighties.

I brought my car into an autobody shop. The owner was chatty and asked what I did for a living. When I told him I was in IT, he said he just loved computers. He showed me his new automated system for tracking parts. I asked if it saved him time. Yes, he said, he no longer has to spend all that time tracking parts manually on paper. However, he admitted that he now spends much of his day entering data into the computer. I asked if the new system saved him money. No, not at all. He spent thousands of dollars on this system. I asked if he really preferred the new system over the old one. No choice, he said. The competition has the new system so he has to have one too. It is an information race.

Google is an advertising company. The web is fueled on advertising. Frankly, I like advertising, but only under very narrow conditions. If I have planned a particular purchase, and advertising for just that product appears just at that time, offering a honest savings, I’m grateful. Print the coupon or whatever, save me money. Call it Just-In-Time (JIT) advertising. But advertising does not work like that, for two reasons. One, greed. Most advertisers prefer to carpet bomb the web so that people who are not thinking about a purchase will start to think about it. Invented wants and needs, it’s not a new concept. Two, technology itself. Automation favours centralization, i.e., it is always easier to program a few simple rules that are true for everyone. Individual variation requires programming for exceptions and that requires work. One of the big boosts of Web 2.0 is that individuals all over the web could throw their hand into the pot, and help provide local information, e.g., how good is the local pizza joint. But Web 2.0 is people at work, not automation. One good reason to turn technology off is that it inundates us with advertising and lots of other useless information. Poor reading material indeed.

Information overload is a threat to intellectual freedom. How many lists and feeds are you on? We have little tolerance for irrelevant posts? The more information we get, the lower tolerance we have for marginal ideas. But the most important ideas often emerge from the margins, the fringes, outside the box. In print culture, access to information was a key concern for intellectual freedom. In digital culture, intellectual freedom is enhanced by reducing the overall amount of information, increasing our tolerance for serendipity, for off-the-wall ideas that just might be the ones we need.

Unchecked, the information race will escalate. Bill Gates wrote a book called Business at the Speed of Thought. Faster computers will not help. Jane Jacobs said of cities that if you build more highways you will only get more traffic. There is no end in sight. I think of the halting problem in computing theory. Alan Turing proved that for any given program and input, we cannot know if the program will ever end. An infinite loop is always a risk. I have asserted my own incompleteness theorem for library science: the best fit of information can never be known for more good information is available in the time it takes to answer a question. We can look to the software programmers, for whom bugs are an endless certainty. Software is never finished; it is merely abandoned. Sometimes walking away is a good idea.

In the arms race of the eighties, we feared what would happen if the button was pushed. In the information race, the wisest course is knowing when to push the button, the off switch.