In October 2010, many gathered at a retirement party for the futurist Alvin Toffler and his wife Heidi. It had been 40 years since the 1970 publication of his groundbreaking book Future Shock, in which he made a number of predictions about where our culture was headed. Many of those predictions came true. At this party, he revisited Future Shock and shared new predictions.
Toffler’s 1970 book popularized the term “information overload” decades before the Internet was commercialized. In his latest report, “40 For The Next 40,” he notes that it is now very easy to collect information faster than it can be analyzed. That information sits on computers unused and accumulating what Toffler calls “cyberdust.”
For example, the Web enables the Transportation Safety Administration (TSA)
and other security organizations to capture full-motion video from security cameras and satellites faster than humans can be expected to analyze it. E-commerce and even your basic Web hosting services capture customer and visitor data faster than you are able to sift through and act on it. Toffler predicts that this will lead to automating analysis tasks that today are done by humans.
I wholeheartedly embrace this concept and can see several implications myself. E-book readers are hot right now, but do a little rough math on them. According to Amazon.com Inc. (Nasdaq: AMZN), the Kindle now holds 3,500 books. A typical novel runs 80,000 to 120,000 words, and an average human reader might read about 300 words per minute. That’s 4 to 6 hours to read a novel. Thus, if you did nothing but read for 40 hours a week, the Kindle would keep you busy for 6.7 to 10.1 years.
Not bad, considering you can fill that Kindle full of books in a day if you wanted! Hours to load the device off the Web -- years to process the data. Cyberdust in action.
Personally, I’m even worse. About five years ago I didn’t have time to read all the business books I wanted, so I subscribed to a service that sold those five-page book summaries. Now I don’t even have time to read the summaries, and my hard drive is filling up. Cyberdust again.
Could this phenomenon trigger a secondary trend around teaching people to speed-read? Will it change how we process and analyze data?
I believe cyberdust may also lead to stress-related disorders. It especially concerns me that we could turn into a nation of skimmers. We’ve been programmed to skim the headlines when met with too much information. We are creatures of deletion by necessity. And, if all you’re doing is skimming, why not multitask and text, listen to your iPod, and watch a streaming video, all at the same time?
I’m afraid we could create a generation of “inch deep, mile wide” multitasking skimmers who might lack the skills and patience to focus in depth on a task if needed. With unemployment at 10 percent and a commoditized job market, pumping an army of non-focused job seekers into the marketplace can’t help the national productivity.
The concept of cyberdust will have great implications for businesses as well. Every time you visit a Website, your clicks and keystrokes are monitored and timed to feed site “stickiness” and popularity ratings. Each online purchase continues to fill up those data warehouses in the cloud. Behind the scenes are trained analysts sifting through that data, looking for patterns and advising on strategies to optimize sales. If data comes in at a rate much faster than they can process it, you have to wonder if those analysts’ jobs are at risk. Could their analysis tasks be automated as Toffler suggests?
Will cyberdust lead to services akin to cyber-housecleaning? We have some of that already with apps focused on clearing your desktop of any icons that have not been accessed in x number of weeks, automatic archiving of old files, etc. Why not carry that concept deeper and broader?
The volume, speed, and complexity of change is greater today than ever before. I believe that applies even more so to information and Internet technology.
— Jeff Cole is president of JCG Management Consulting Ltd., a firm specializing in business process improvement and change management.
Information does not "go off", or rot, in the manner of meat. In science, it becomes less relevant as new, more complete theories are formulated and tested. For example, in history, it provides a platform for future scholars to re-visit historical pivots, and offer new theories. In philosophy, it provides the knowledge base that helps newcomers to create new thinking.
Civilization is impossible without written records. In the days of scribes, this was a laborious process. With the invention of the printing press, the volume of data in the hands of the individual exploded. With the invention of the computer, and the doubling of capacity every 18 months, and the introduction of the cloud, data availability has exploded.
As time passes, current data becomes less relevant to more and more people. But I would not regard the writings of Martin Luther as rotten meat simply because less than 1 person in 100,000 have read them. And at what point would we regard the movie "Avatar" as removable from the human experience? When only one person in a million watches it in their lifetime, in 500 years time?
The point is, we can keep accumulating this cyberdust, because the cost of keeping it actually halves every 16 months, while we simultaneously double computing horsepower every 16 months. In the foreseeable future, we can expect to have smarter search engines and computer assistants to help us find the most arcane information, and translate it into any language we choose.
The concern of the huge energy consumption of the Cloud is rather naive. In 1956, the IBM 305 disk drive stored 4.4 megabytes, and used about 2,000 watts of power to run. Today, we have 2,000,000 megabyte drives that run on less that 20 watts.
But even more important, when in the Cloud, as part of a search engine, the information on these modern disks can be accessed by the whole world. It may aggregate the power consumption, which appears huge, but there is no doubt that the cost of duplicating the same data on millions of disk drives is vastly more expensive both for energy and space than keeping four global data centers with RAID online. Look at the millions of users of Microsoft Office, the power consumption and disk space, and compare that with Google Documents. No contest, with regards to energy consumption. Google wins hands down.
We havbe seen amazing evolution with search engines over the past 15 years. This, like everything else in computing, will continue to improve exponentially.
Meanwhile, I don't want to see Information Elites suggesting data-burning. It is a huge waste of effort, an excess of administrative decision-making and control-freakery. Instead, throw your efforts behind more intelligent computing and making storage cheaper and faster.
Why I just took a break from cleaning a corporate wiki so cyberdust is on my mind!
I actually see the impacts of cyberdust more in small organizations - on intranets in particular than on the Internet.
One good thing the search engines do is drive up the accessibility of pages that are frequently updated and other people have found useful. Thus, at the same time it drives down the popularity of older and quite possibly inaccurate pages.
However, in a smaller environment - like a company's public drive, wiki or Intranet - you don't have the masses of visitor behavior to have that type of impact. Outdate information seems to thrive in organizations. I bet that inaccurate information on policies, support etc can be found on any shared drive/wiki in the business world.
I recall in the 70s always giving Toffler’s books a wide berth. Toffler, Buckminster Fuller, and countless whacky looking covers from back issues of Popular Science have their own allotted dustbin.
The skimmers have always been there. Don’t lose sleep over them or their digital chewing gum. It’s all, to bring up another title from that era, grist for the mill.
GGrrrreeeattt term Mary. Meatspace Hmmmm... Sticks in and has serious implications...
Meat, if unattended, gets rotten! And I think that's our general idea of concern. I think meatspace carries the burden better than web dust. BEcause dust seems only a nuissance while it is not just that.
Great point on the resources that "cyberdust" consumes, RamonAntonio. Instead of focusing on whether we need to start speed reading or whether multitasking is spoiling our everyday judgment and discernment, maybe we should also look at the very real meatspace waste involved in preserving this stuff.
There has to be a point at which too much information becomes destructive. I think each individual and corporation must figure out where that point is and start drawing the line.
I have to say the list of trends and predictions was so familiar and predictable and ultimately dull, that I ended up skimming before I reached 15 out of the 40. I too read Toffler(s) way back when paperbacks were the new medium (couldn't afford the 5 bucks for the hardcover, but I wanted to own it, not just borrow it from the library), and am sorry to see that the Associates have not been able to progress beyond watching the 22 minutes of network news.
Very sad.
Anyone remember "Megatrends"? Blanking on the author's name at the moment, but I remember thinking his method of identifying trends was wacky even at the time: measuring the inches of space newspapers gave to various topics.
I also remember Richard Saul Wurman's "Information Anxiety" -- and I think if one looked hard enough one could find a quote from some Renaissance figure about the dangers of too much information now that the printing press is printing something other than Bibles. In fact, I know the Catholic Church was upset at the sudden direct access of the (upper class, educated) masses to the Bible. They predicted heresies, and heresy they got. Or independent thinking, from another perspective.
The issue is how the filtering and selection works. Is there a priesthood, writing in hieroglyphics to keep other people from knowing what they're writing? Are there corporations with fingers on the scales to weight the data in their financial favor? But are there also altruists reading widely and deeply and sharing stuff the rest of us miss?
As long as we have access to the data, I think we'll be okay.
I share your optimism, JC. I think we will learn how to process and distinguish the processing, as Jeff outlines with Alvin Toffler, from the analysis and information use. I don't think we have yet reached the point of doing that, by and large. I think that is where technology can aid us, rather than bury us.
To the issue of multi-tasking and skimming, I think somewhere down the line the people using technology that have not discovered the value of "learning" and delving deeper than a tweet to discover the content, meaning, and background, will be exposed to the value of knowledge and the benefits of true information.
Your comment of speed reading really captured my attention (I was not skimming though). I'm currently reading Jimmy Carter's Washington Diaries and early on he talks about how they all took speed reading courses in order to get through the vast amount of material they needed to read.
I, like others here, don't see the phenomenon of cyber dust as a bad thing. In some ways it is probably beneficial to the hoarding that others have mentioned. How many physical books do we all have in our houses? I certainly don't have a Kindle's worth, but I definitely have way more than necessary, and it is taking up a ton of space that could be freed for other purposes. Maybe we are taking advantage of the information overload because it is so easy? I'd rather have too many ebooks stored on my computer taking up space that costs virtually nothing than having to find more space and making more trips to Ikea for bookshelves.
Completely agree. The total amount of information is greater, but the hurdles remain the same. There's still only so much we can process even if access is easier than ever.
I do worry that we are indeed become a generation of skimmers but with two young boys who are just now learning to read, I still see hope. Hope in the human spirit, hope in the desire to truly know things, and hope in the fact that we WILL get past this stage and learn how to effectively deal with access to a universe of information at our fingertips. In the long wrong, I have to believe this is a good thing even if the path might be rocky at times.
The ThinkerNet does not reflect the views of TechWeb. The ThinkerNet is an informal means of communication to members and visitors of the Internet Evolution site. Individual authors are chosen by Internet Evolution to blog. Neither Internet Evolution nor TechWeb assume responsibility for comments, claims, or opinions made by authors and ThinkerNet bloggers. They are no substitute for your own research and should not be relied upon for trading or any other purpose.
Drop me in as keynote speaker at any industry conference you want -- cement, high tech, medical devices, restaurants... and my message is consistent: It's all about quality, and it's all about excellence.
Over the holidays, I went to Target to buy my wife a high-tech gift. Evidently, I’d slept in a half-hour too late on Black Friday, as the last one of the item I wanted had just been sold.
According to the World English Dictionary, profiling is defined as "the practice of categorizing people and predicting their behavior according to particular characteristics such as race or age." Profiling has been a legal and ethical hot button in this age where privacy issues are front-page news.
As a management consultant and trainer, I have worked with more than 4,000 people to improve business processes across a variety of industries. Along the way, I’ve encountered a trend that is sometimes called automation, or in more current terms, "electronic management."
AT&T showed off lots of improvements to its IPTV service this week. The overall message: IP, Good! Cable, Bad! Phil predicts what it all means for the broadcast proletariat.
Comcast and other broadband providers just might exempt content they own from counting against consumer Internet usage caps. Would that make their broadband services more desirable?
With the number of mobile broadband users more than doubling in 2009, and soon to exceed fixed broadband, the Internet saw a historic transition this year – and the long-term effects are incalculable.
How do you recognize an Internet bubble when you see one? Saunders explains how all bubbles have four symptoms in common – and takes a swipe at Google and Twitter into the bargain.
China is investing heavily in fiber to the premises to propel itself into the world broadband Internet first division. What's it deploying, and what's it going to do with all that bandwidth?
New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority is conducting a pilot test of digital kiosks to guide subway users to where they want to go more efficiently and at lower cost.
EU operators are considering joining up to create a pan-European network to reduce competitive overbuild and cost. This might lower costs and focus operators on higher-level, more interesting services.
New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority is conducting a pilot test of digital kiosks to guide subway users to where they want to go more efficiently and at lower cost.
The whole Amazon.reader debate is a double-stupid. It's stupid to think that there's any e-book buyer who doesn't know Amazon's URL, and it was stupider to let ICANN launch the whole free-form TLD initiative to start with.
While NFC's original goal was to enhance mobile commerce applications, it is finding its way into a number of other uses, which is creating both opportunity as well as challenges for IT departments.
Enterprises would like to move to cloud computing but are hesitant because they are concerned about providers’ ability to secure company data. Here are some tips that help to ensure that if breaches occur, the business is not left holding the bag.
Edmunds separates customers into segments based on the info it collects on its site and from partners, and uses that to push out custom content, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
The automotive website uses propensity modeling to target ads and customer registration forms, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
Expert Integrated Systems: Changing the Experience & Economics of IT In this e-book, we take an in-depth look at these expert integrated systems -- what they are, how they work, and how they have the potential to help CIOs achieve dramatic savings while restoring IT's role as business innovator. READ THIS eBOOK
your weekly update of news, analysis, and
opinion from Internet Evolution - FREE! REGISTER HERE
Wanted! Site Moderators Internet Evolution is looking for a handful of readers to help moderate the message boards on our site – as well as engaging in high-IQ conversation with the industry mavens on our thinkerNet blogosphere. The job comes with various perks, bags of kudos, and GIANT bragging rights. Interested?
To save this item to your list of favorite Internet Evolution content so you can find it later in your Profile page, click the "Save It" button next to the item.
Email This
