No sooner had I put Internet and Online on my list of Tired Words, I came across this article by Luciano Floridi. It was a follow-on article of a similar near-future look at the Internet, written in 1995.
It was an amazing article, getting a lot of thinking going for me in many ways. For starters, he uses the word ‘infosphere’, which, to me, approximates best what I feel when we struggle to explain what the Internet, what being online, has come to mean.
He says, early in the article:
"Infosphere" is a word I coined years ago on the basis of "biosphere," a term referring to that limited region on our planet that supports life. By "infosphere," then, I mean the whole informational environment made up of all informational entities (including informational agents), their properties, interactions, processes, and relations. It is an environment comparable to, but different from, "cyberspace" (which is only one of the sub-regions of the infosphere, as it were), since the infosphere also includes offline and analog spaces of information. We shall see that it is also an environment (and hence a concept) that is rapidly evolving.
And later in the article:
The digital is spilling over into the analog and merging with it. This recent phenomenon is variously known as "ubiquitous computing," "ambient intelligence," "The Internet of Things," or "Web-augmented things." It is, or will soon be, the next stage in the digital revolution.
And also (which appealed to my long-time ubicomp love):
Nowadays, we are used to considering the space of information as something we log in to and log out from. Our view of the world is still modern or Newtonian: it is made of "dead" cars, buildings, furniture, clothes, which are non-interactive, irresponsive, and incapable of communicating, learning, or memorizing. But what we still experience as the world offline is bound to become a fully interactive and responsive environment of wireless, pervasive, distributed, a2a (anything to anything) information processes, that works a4a (anywhere for anytime), in real time. This interactive digital environment will first gently invite us to understand the world as something "a-live" (artificially live), i.e. as comprising agents capable of interacting with us in various ways (shoes, for example, used to be "dead" artifacts, but you can now interact with the pair of Nike shoes you are wearing through your iPod). Such animation of the world will, paradoxically, make our outlook closer to that of pre-technological cultures which interpreted all aspects of nature as inhabited by animating spirits.
Next, it was his comments on the rate of growth in data (next quote) that put me onto the thought that our measurements are too small to be used anymore to talk about huge (for us) sizes, which led me to wonder if we still need such measurements.
Although the production of analog data is still increasing, the infosphere is becoming more digital by the day. A simple example may help to drive the point home: the new Large Hadron Collider that is being built at the CERN to explore the physics of particles will produce up to 1.5 GB of data per second, or an estimated 5 petabytes of data annually, a quantity of data hundreds of times larger than the Library of Congress’s print collection (estimated at 20 terabytes) and about as large as Google’s whole data storage, reported to be approximately 5 petabytes. (If you’re having trouble with these units, a petabyte is 1,024 terabytes, and an exabyte is 1,024 petabytes.)
And, looking at my notes, he started mentioning the flow of data, talking about ‘superconductivity’ and ‘friction’ and ‘frictionless’ flow. Two thoughts came to mind, that in the famous phrase ‘Information wants to be free’ (by my idol, Stewart Brand), ‘free’ meant ‘cost’. But, thinking of information that runs and moves constantly in communication networks, I think ‘free’, to me, means ‘roam freely’ without friction or barriers.
The other thought, that I see in my liner notes was that radio (wireless) connections are mostly short range. With data networks, wires will rule, wires will be the real pipes of the Infosphere. We can never be truly wireless. I am no longer sure what the connection was, but I think I was trying to envision a Hyperconnective World where there were no wires, anywhere.
Because of their "data superconductivity," information and communication technologies are well known for being among the most influential factors that affect friction in the infosphere. We are all acquainted with daily aspects of a frictionless infosphere, such as spamming, and concepts such as micropayments, which become possible only when there is no friction in the transmission of payment information between parties.
Being a scholar, Floridi also started talking about treating the Infosphere as an ecology that also needs attention, stewardship, and study. That made me think of someone being called a Digital Ecologist (for some reason, danah boyd comes to mind). The thought really tugged at my forgotten academic side – ah, the Great Questions.
We should be working on an ecology of the infosphere if we wish to avoid problems such as a tragedy of the digital commons. In other words, we are leaving our children not just a slew of planetary environmental problems, but problems that will infect and contaminate the infosphere as well.
Oy, this is a long post, with all that quoted text, so you should definitely read the article in its entirety (and also the original article from 1995, since it is still interesting).
There were two other things he said that I jumped on that jarred my thoughts once more of a post-electronic age.
He mentioned the ‘mind’ of appliances. It kinda reminded me of how I describe to my children the ‘mind’ of animals. Animals are best at being who they are. A rat is the best goddamn animal at doing what it does. Its mind and body responds to the environment in a rat way and it so happens that some of that response is highly sophisticated and displays rat intelligence. But, don’t ask a rat to be a dog or any other animal. Its mind can’t do that any more than our mind can do what a rat’s does.
on the one hand there is the human user’s outside world, and on the other hand there is the dynamic, watery, soapy, hot, and dark world of the dishwasher; the equally watery, soapy, hot and dark but also spinning world of the washing machine; or the still, aseptic, soap-less, cold, and potentially luminous world of the refrigerator. These robots can be successful because they have their environments "wrapped" and tailored around their capacities, not vice versa. Imagine someone trying to build a droid like C-3PO capable of washing their dishes in the sink exactly in the same way as a human would. It makes no sense. [emphasis, mine – CS]
The other item, that has its own particularly problems in a post-electronic age: power.
Sufficient battery life: One important problem that we shall face will concern the availability of sufficient energy to stay connected to the infosphere non-stop, not just through our working day, but through the rest of our waking hours (and possibly even while we sleep). It is what Intel calls "the battery life challenge."
My thought? It’s alive! Just keep feeding it pellets. 🙂
