Ubiquitous Information Gathering

These are strange days for entities in the world.  Never before have they been so surveilled - and all for their own good.  From the furthest reaches of the ocean to the aridest stretches of desert, sensors are recording inormation about us.  Let's stick with humans for the nonce.  My own private homeland of England is arguably the most monitored nation on earth - it's hard to walk down the streets of London town without being picked up on cameras as you dip into Tesco's for a Guardian (that should protect you :-)) or swing into the pub for a half pint of Fuller's ESB.  On the Underground, the only bit of tape that seems to have gone missing in the past few years is the recording of the unfortunate incident of Jean Charles de Menenez, shot for wearing a bulky jacket.

For non-human entities the story is not so different.  In order to understand what's going on with the environment, it seems an unproblematic truth that we need more information about what's going on.  We constantly monitor changes in the ozone layer, ocean currents, clouds, species distribution, forest cover, earthquake distribution, asteroids in near earth orbit and so on ad inf.  The latter is an interesting case - there's a debate going on about how to inform the public about threats (like the one that wiped out the dinosaurs) - since new instrumentation will enable us to pick up many more possible collisions over the next twenty to forty years, and 'we' (being the Western scientists) aren't sure just how much to let the public know about these, since there is a risk of panic.  (On a tangent - they had to change the definition of TB in the 1950s since more sensitive measures were able to pick up sub-clinical cases which fit the then definition; just as we are all in some stages of cancer if we don't filter the findings accordingly - we adjust our information to what the market will bear). 

A basic premise in all this information gathering is that more information is always good.  If only we could monitor everyone all the time (down to seeing through our clothing in the latest aiport security scanners), monitor nature in real time - then somehow our problems would go away.  We'd be able to manage ourselves and our plannet better.  There are sound economic reasons for this - monitoring is a multi-billion dollar business, and feeds and clothes an inordinate number of people.  However, there is a strong sennse in which we are using monitoring as a substitute for thought.

Let me give an example from left field.  In the 1980s, there was a terrific project out of UC Irvine which put the complete body of classical Greek literature onto a CD (no DVDs in those benighted times).  This was called the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae.  How marvelous that was.  No longer was the classical Greek scholar doomed to wander the earth finding every trace of agape (Platonic love) in obscure texts - they could do it with the punch of a button.  A lifetime of travel in a trice.  What joy never to have to see the mountains of Thessaly (and, more seriously, what a cutdown in carbon footprint).  Two issues arose here. First, as Karen Ruhleder wrote, the new omnibus edition froze certain readings of the texts - so that possible variations in the interpretation of a given fragment were rendered even more undiscoverable than before.  Second, and more to the point here, a classical Greek professor I spoke with said that the problem was they were just asking the same darned questions, just getting much quicker responses.

To spell this out.  Monitoring of all sorts is heavily structured - we know what we are looking for and we don't see the 'noise'.  There is a tendency to believe that because we have teraflops of data we have the complete story.  *Every* story is partial, incomplete, imbued with cultural and political values.  That's a good and necessary thing - but the simple fact needs to be recognized if we are to grow as a species.  Second, we really really need to start thinking about new kinds of question to ask.  There is a massive disproportion in the world right now of information gathering with respect to information analysis.  The latter involves sitting back, contemplating, talking, generating new ideas.  But wait - there's no time for that, the latest batch of information just came in.