Lofland bLOG

Currently Listening to The World As Best As I Remember It, Volume 1 by Rich Mullins

First, here is a very interesting presentation, if the link isn’t dead yet:

http://www.glumbert.com/media/shift

And then these facts:

“It took two centuries to fill the U.S. Library of Congress in Washington, DC, with more than 29 million books and periodicals, 2.7 million recordings, 12 million photographs, 4.8 million maps, and 57 million manuscripts. Today it takes about 15 minutes for the world to churn out an equivalent amount of new digital information. It does so about 100 times every day, for a grand total of 5 exabytes annually.” http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/jul05/1568

“The first disk drive in 1956 stored 2,000 bits per square inch. In disk drives today, the figure is as high as 135 billion bits per square inch. That’s almost a 70 million fold increase! And in the next 5 years, we will ship m ore disk drives than we shipped in the first 50 years.” - Currie Munce, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies

Our world has undergone a huge change, and we in it.

I remember hearing about a man who lived some centuries ago who had read everything available in print in several languages. That was entirely possible for someone who was literate enough , but more importantly, wealthy enough to do so.

Information was something you drank in. You drank it and it became a part of you. Universities would be a place full of books and people full of information from which you took it in. Like huge drinking fountains.

Today you can no longer drink information. It is as if drinking in the Ocean. No, instead we must navigate it. We must learn to swim in it, or drown in it. Universities, rather than drinking fountains, are now schools to teach SCUBA diving.

Dealing with information today is as different from the past as drinking a glass of water is from SCUBA diving. It is still water, but what we can and must do with it is totally different.

Posted 4/23/2007 10:34 AM

3 Comments:

Wow, I really like your description. Very poignant. And I completely agree about modern Universities. virtually all literary scholars have to come to grips with the fact that we will likely never come up with an original literary idea, and even for those who do, the vast majority of our academic lives will actually be spent sifting and swimming through mountains of other people’s theories, ideas and findings that we will then apply in our own way, to make our own arguments. It’s nuts. Comp I has for the most part been narrowed down to: teach them how to read, teach them how to find info (research) and regurgitate it back, in a format centered around citing sources (MLA/APA): thus the research paper. That is the basic building block of all language-oriented studies. It really tells you something. Good post.

Tegwen†
Posted 4/23/2007 11:24 AM by Tegwenava

Yes, how true. And who knows what to make of all this. I’m torn between the reality that the world is irreversibly changed and changing, and wondering if we should try to reverse some of the effects. For instance, all the swimming in the sea of information seems to make me an info-bulimic. I drink it in and spit it up, then drink in some more. It’s so hard to absorb anything.

And then there’s the problem of having to re-learn skills all the time as tools change. Programmers who mastered procedural programming soon had to get their heads around object-oriented programming (and few did, it seems), and now there’s functional programming, service-oriented, etc. In older arts, the discipline is stable. Accountants never have to re-learn the subtleties of credit and debit, because the concepts were set it stone long ago. Part of me longs for the day when today’s new things become old and stable, so we can figure out what it takes to master them.

Maybe these are “good” problems to have. But I don’t think our education prepares us well to handle it all. And who knows how it should?

I also think you like it. You’re the guy that likes learning new gadgets, and even overhauling your system of organizing your life. Maybe I should develop that taste. All the re-learning and revamping just seems like such an interruption. I would rather be creating something than re-learning my creative tools.

Hmmm. Maybe it’s the perfectionists who will drown in this ocean.
Posted 4/24/2007 8:01 AM by jonathan_camenisch

I have thought about this some more, and I have to post an amendment to my own comment. I’m realizing that I like this ocean of information too. I like it because we actually have tools to manage it well.

An example is my wife’s business website (rebeccassilverrose.com). We created that site last summer. It’s nothing big, not in the top 100 or 100,000 sites on the web. We’ve made hardly an effort to market the site, beyond designing it carefully and listing her business on Superpages and Google maps.

What’s amazing in this day and age is that people actually find the site! I mean people that are looking for a florist in Oklahoma City find it and get in touch with her through it.

In other words, we added our little drop to that sea of information, and some of those who have a valid interest actually find it! In 15-years-ago terms, that’s incredible.

So I like it. The efficiencies are astounding. I’m just overwhelmed by it all sometimes. I think that to keep our humanity and our sanity, we need to step away from it all sometimes, slow down, and drink in more of less, instead of so little of so much.
Posted 4/27/2007 12:23 PM by jonathan_camenisch