You may find out anyway

Not knowing or not wanting to know ... looking life in the eye or burying one's head in the sand. These are commonly accepted options. Unfortunately -- or fortunately, depending on how one looks at it -- these aren't as clear-cut as they once were. Oh sure, there is no shortage of indivduals who would love to just close their eyes and make it all go away, and not being able to do that, they tune into their favorite propaganda/news channel and simply see and hear what they want to anyway. As we saw last time, we do it in regard to the past, so why not also in the here-and-now. I hate to be the one to break it to you, but this approach is getting less effective each and every day. You're probably going to find out what's going on anyway.

It's getting harder and harder to keep a secret, have you noticed? President 29 (Harding) fathers a child in the broom closet of the White House and writes heavy-breather letters to his mistress and who knows about it? President 35 (Kennedy) turns out to be quite the ladies' man and when did we find out about it? Sooner than we found out about Harding. President 42 (Clinton) gets frisky in the Oval Office and the torches and pitchforks are out because we know about it while he's still in office.

We suspected for years that "Big Brother" was watching us, and the reaction the Manning and Snowden revelations unleashed was so strong because no one had wanted to believe that it was as all-pervasive and detailed as it is. This particular issue is complicated by the fact that Americans -- not exclusively, but in particular -- are not so sensitive about such things when they are happening to others (What's the big deal about tapping Merkel's cell?) but are overly sensitive when they are affected themselves (What do you mean they're listening to my phone calls?).

The point is that everything, sooner or later, gets out, becomes known, is revealed. The Internet never forgets. Sure, technology has made all this more possible, but it's not the only reason that we get access to more than we sometimes want to know and it becomes increasingly difficult to keep anything to oneself.

The flip side of this is, of course, that there in an increasing amount of information we're not allowed to keep to ourselves. Apply for a mortgage or any significant loan. Get yourself a passport. Gee, get on an airplane and have yourself scanned. For Americans, who are most often content telling a commercial enterprise anything they want to know but get freaked when we find out it's the government, this may all seem normal. But, for Germans, just as one example, the notion of the "glass citizen" (der gläserne Bürger) is somewhere between disconcerting and downright frightening. By contrast, they may be willing to tell the government more, but they get very, very uneasy when this information gets into private hands. And rightfully so. However, the ability to restrict the divulging of information, the capability to protect one's personal, private sphere, is becoming ever more difficult.

I know, I know ... all of you are perfectly honorable, responsible, and open individuals who have absolutely nothing to hide. That may well be, but that's not the point. The downside is that not everyone who has access to you will treat you as such. The more of us that's "out there" is all the more over which we have little influence and absolutely no control. At what point does our publicly available self become "more real" than our own private person?

This is not only something to think about, it is something you need to think very deeply about. And, if nothing else, it is something that we certainly need to become more aware of.

IT envy

The promotion of data to information and the reduction of knowledge to information have farther-reaching consequences that we may want to admit. This is particularly true when we link it to our obsessive compulsion with "having", with owning, with property. Remembering Mr. Eliot, we can say that wisdom is a priceless pearl, knowledge an expensive luxury, but information … well, that's a commodity that can be bought and sold just like any other. IPR shouldn't stand for "intellectual property rights", it should stand for "information property rights", for in so many cases that is all we're really dealing with.

Our current motto "s/he who dies with the most information wins" loses its whimsical nature. It used to be (at least in Francis Bacon's day) that knowledge was power, today information is power. Ergo, whoever has the most and can process it the fastest, turn it around and fire it back the quickest, who can generate and accumulate the most is the winner (read: the best, the smartest, the most powerful …). And what can do just that? Of course, the computer. And so we raise the machine to our ideal, we yield to its unerring accuracy, its lightening swift sifting, sorting, and filtering, we pay homage to its power. Yes, in a sense, we begin to worship it for it's godlike power.

You think I'm exaggerating? You should think again. This might be how I observe things, but I'm certainly not the only one to have noticed.

Günther Anders, the contemporary German philosopher has gone so far as to argue that we have in fact become ashamed of our humanity, of being born; we'd wish deep down, in our heart of hearts that we could be made like our computers. The first time I read this, I was taken aback, I'll admit, but if you take the thought seriously, Mr. Anders is onto something. Have you ever heard the argument that a given course of action is the best, because someone had "crunched" the numbers and that's what came out. In that moment, we don't even think of questioning the outcome: they're numbers, the computer said so, who are we to argue? Money never sleeps, electronic trading never tires nor errs, businesses are bought and sold, hundreds of millions of lives are affected, both directly and indirectly, business deals are automated all without ever being touched by human hands. One of our secret-most desires to is simply get those fickle humans out of the equation. Whenever they get involved, let's face it, they just screw things up.

We place way too much faith in digital technology, in information processing. The information-processing model of mind is the dominant theory these days, but it couldn't be farther from reality. It might seem like a mere metaphor to describe an exceedingly complex phenomenon. But we've gone beyond the metaphor and now mistake it for the reality. That's the dangerous step, but it's one we should perhaps think about taking a step back on.

Reference
Anders, G. (2009) Die Antiquiertheit der Menschen I, 3rd edn, Munich, Beck.

The man behind the curtain

The "information" gadget non plus ultra is the computer. Don't we just love our computers. It doesn't matter what size, shape, color or speed, we love them. They're everywhere, too. Our traffic is controlled by computers, they help us fly and land planes, they control much of our driving ability, they collect data against terrorists (or innocent people, it doesn't matter, as long as they are collecting data), they get us to the moon, Mars or Jupiter, they guide our missiles, they give us our passports and they send us notices from the finance authorities. They are simply everywhere. We can't work without them anymore. In fact, we can't live without them anymore: from copy machines, to (not-so) smart phones, to laptops, notebooks, and desktops, they are an intimate part of all our lives. We can't get enough of them and we have no idea what they do to us. We think we know what they do for us, but it's a lot less "for" than "to".

Still, I just love the words we use to describe them: fast, powerful, smart, and – my personal favorite – sexy. They're machines. They're things. OK, Steve Jobs and Apple tried to make them accessories and furniture, but they didn't quite succeed. Computers have receded into the nethermost corners of our lives, and these are the most nefarious, because we take them for granted. But the ones we "have to have", that we flash around, are accorded a reverence that they may not deserve. What's so special about them anyway?

They sit on our desks and stare us down workday in and workday out. They spit out reams of tables and figures that we don't have the time to double-check so we take them as correct. They give us access to others because we hardly get out at all anymore. They get us things (downloads), make our lives convenient (just ask Amazon), and control every move we make, every thought we think, and every moment we'd like to rest. That's not what I call "special". But, in spite of it all they can get more bits to more places faster and more reliable that has ever been possible before. And, it is this simple illusion that makes us think that "we are making real cultural progress – and the that the essence of that progress is information technology". (Roszak, 1986, p. 29)

So, is that progress? Is this what we understand progress to be? It is becoming ever more difficult to distinguish between what is real and what is not. Is that what we want? Have we ever stopped to ask ourselves how substantial all this information technology is? I don't really want to believe that progress is an illusion, but when we stop to take a look, things may not be as real as we would like to believe. Simply pay not attention to the man behind the curtain.

Reference
Roszak, T. (1988) The Cult of Information: The Folklore of Computers and the True Art of Thinking, London, Paladin Graftin Books.

Roszak and Eliot

If you have never read Theodore Roszak's The Cult of Information, you don't know what you're missing. It should actually be mandatory reading for anyone who thinks they have something to say about technology or the so-called information age. Of course, to get anything out of it, you'd have to approach it with an open mind, so if you're unwary of technology or downright obsessed with it, it would be better you just let it go. I don't contend that everything the man says is right, but I would argue that what he has to say is worth thinking about. William James once remarked that what most people call thinking is simply a rearranging of their prejudices, and I can't say much has changed since he said it. But, if you are willing to earnestly consider a clearly stated position on a well-defined subject, I would say the time spent with the book would be more than worth the effort.

There was a time – and not all that long ago – when a distinction was made between some very similar things. For example, data was just whatever it was, a date, a color, a statement, a fact. Information was something "more": it was data that was used to make a decision, or at least contributed to the making of a decision. Knowledge was something "more" than information; it was something one knew, what could be used to act in an informed way, to exercise a skill or provide an argument. Finally, at the top, we had wisdom ... well, who even knows that that is any more? This isn't a new phenomenon, I'm afraid. In 1934, the poet T.S. Eliot wrote (in The Rock):

Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

He knew where we were headed ... and what do you know? We're finally there. We no longer talk about data at all, and everything else ... and I mean everything else ... has been simply turned into information.

If the motto of the 80s was "whoever dies with the most toys wins", the motto today is "whoever dies with the most information wins". Though I would say that whoever dies, dies. It doesn't really matter what they have when they do.

Let's face it, we love information: from baseball statistics to football scores, to monthly rainfall measurements, to the mileage we get with our cars, to stock-market prices and indices, to interest rates, to the most common boy's name of 1913, to the number of jobs not created since the latest tax cuts. It doesn't matter what it's about, as long as it's what we think is information, we love it.

In this regard, the title of Roszak's book is not all that far off. We've made information and the acquisition of information a kind of cult. And as is the case with every cult, it needs it priests, and there is no shortage of them either. We call them "experts" these days.