Big data, but little information?
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http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2011-10/and-yet-and-yet
An interesting article on POPSCI by Lawrence Weschler on how we'll handle the vast amount of data we, as a species, are compiling at a breakneck pace. And this is before (or perhaps just as) the writer-bots begin absorbing and synthesizing information in order to free up the need to let humans do the job of reporting on humanity.
According to Business Insider, there is an estimated 14.3 trillion pages on the Web. I can't find any reliable data on how fast that's growing, but this is in less than two decades and the speed at which we are adding to this is only increasing.
What this makes me wonder is how we'll lose ourselves in this data if that number continues to grow exponentially and what we might, as a species, come up with to limit that growth? Maybe that's one of the future iterations of the Web as a pseudo-lifeform is to catagorize like nodes and file them appropriately (and maybe kill the plagiarism that results in the same article being reprinted on dozens of sites by bots) so we can do a better job of comparing similar viewpoints. But this also begs the question of which viewpoints will last?
They say to the victors write history, but they also get the spoils. Looking back through time, I'm guessing the best examples from archaeologigal digs came from the wealthy. The 1% who could afford to have monuments erected around their corpse and belongings or were living in the best built and most stable homes when the end came, be it molten rock or pagan barbarians. Currently, the best archived information is kept on the most stable platforms on the best equipment behind the best firewalls. Does this mean MASH, Friends, Law and Order, Britney Spears and The Black Eyed Peas stand a better chance to last a millenia? It probably does. Television, film and music are hugely popular and have billions of dollars behind them.
While that might not be a horrible thing, these are artistic remnants of our society after all, they're hardly most people would believe to be as meaningful as Pulitzer Prize material or maybe even sinning student poetry.
Now this brings me to the thought that perhaps the most important thing we should archive are the people. While not everyone will receive a well written biography, we should be able to automate some form of capsulization of a person's life and embed it in some permanent system, right? Instead of having that research done by some future intern-algorithm, it would be nice if familiy and friends did the job.
Oh, crap. What if that's Facebook?