An Ethnology of Solitude is a forthcoming article commissioned by RIXC as part of At Home in Europe; translated into four languaes in the accompanying publication.
Borges' map, described in "On Exactitude in Science", imagines an empire where the science of cartography has become so exacting that only a map of the same scale as the empire itself is sufficient. This seems prescient of the increasing digitization, both of the world about us and correspondingly of our own lives. The world’s fastest computer in 2006, IBM's Blue Gene L, has more processing capability than the 500 most powerful computers of 2001 combined. Blue Gene L is 15 times more powerful than its predecessor: within five seconds it can produce a volume of data equivalent to the total information held in the British Library. The data collected by our networks, in data warehouses and elsewhere, vastly exceeds that which could be recorded about our world and knowledge on the 1:1 scale Borges imagined.
This is a world where people live online – working and communicating; inhabiting online spaces – in a state of continuous connectivity, everything is done via the Internet.
We are now at the dawning of the age of ubiquitous computing. When computers are starting, no longer, to be the box on the desk or the slab warming our legs. The computer as an artifact will disappear. As they become embedded and ambient, our interaction with them will become more invisible; more human. We will become more human. (We are not there yet). But as yet, the people who will be most affected by it, the overwhelming majority of whom are non-technical, non-specialist, ordinary citizens of the developed world, barely know what will be.
A mobile phone can be switched off or left [forgotten] at home. A computer can be shut down, unplugged, and walked away from. Yet, this coming ambient, ubiquitous technology will be capable of insinuating itself into all the apertures everyday life affords it. Computers will not exists in the form we know them today. The environment will be formed in a way that current technology cannot possibly ever create.
New Information
The ‘digital revolution’ has both powered and measured by the ability to transmit, process and store information. PCs become out of date within two years of manufacture because under Moore’s Law, the power of chips to process information doubles every 18 months. According to research published in November 2003 by the University of California , more information has been created and stored in the last five years than at any time before in human history. In 2002 print, film, magnetic and optical storage media produced about five exabytes of new information. One exabyte is a billion gigabytes: somewhat over a quintillion (or ten to the eighteenth power) bytes. Five exabytes of information is the equivalent of half a million new libraries the size of the print section of the US Library of Congress, which is America’s library of record. They believe that at this current rate, 800MB of information is produced for each member of the human race each year. That would take over nine meters of books to store. Remember this is new information. It is already double what was happening three years before that; and these figures are now five years old: computer access has been on the rise and the network is forever expanding.
Perhaps we will find that a world with too much information presents as many problems as one with too little. If we can have access to everything; what do we choose to see, to use. If anything can be accessed what will the data be used for.
Connected Networks
“In addition to the formal, or semi-formal, international organizations and laws [in our world], many other mechanisms act to regulate human activities across national borders. In particular, international trade in goods, services and currencies – the global-market – has a tremendous impact on the lives of people in almost all parts of the world, creating deep interdependency amongst nations. Trans-national corporations, some with resources exceeding those available to most governments, govern activities of people on a global scale. The rapid increase in the volume of trans-border digital communications and mass-media distribution (eg, Internet, satellite television) has allowed information, ideas, and opinions to rapidly spread across the world, creating a complex web of international coordination and influence, mostly outside the control of any formal organizations or laws.”
We can already see one spatial change that digital networks have brought: that is the degree to which we are now implicitly and explicitly connected to each other. Mobile phones already do this more than anything else, now our connectedness travels with us everywhere we go. The web has evolved into an indispensable tool for our daily lives. This is the profound force that is re-shaping the way we and society act. The network of our connections is becoming woven into our physical lives.
Every item connected in the Internet requires a unique address; in a similar way buildings have postal addresses so one can be differentiated from the others. This address is called an Internet Protocol address (IP address). By virtue of extending the length of individual addresses in IPv6 to a generous 128 bits, the address space evoked becomes a staggering 2128 discrete hosts – roughly equivalent to a number that starts with the numeral 3 and continues for 38 zeros. That works out to 6.5 x 1023 for every square meter on the surface of the planet. There are quite enough addresses that every shoe, road sign, door, bookshelf and pill – in fact every item - in the world can have one of its own.
Metcalfe’s Law states that the usefulness, or utility, of a network equals the square of the number of users. In other words, the value of networked systems grows exponentially as the user population increases in a linear manner.
Ultimately, everything will be connected and interdependent. This is already becoming evident and is no longer a dream from the 1990s.
Remember computers will vastly evolve from how we know, and interact with them today. Nor will electricity be as we know today. We shall understand and harness natural, inherent, energy.
Everything will [have the possibility to] communicate with anything else. Every device and process will exist as data and will be able to flow anywhere. Once anything can communicate with everything; computing becomes ubiquitous and will become invisible. The data and the processes will be invisible. Data will no longer be transmitted. Data will simply exist. As the network will just be everything, everywhere. – ubiquitous – so will the data. There will be no need to transmit from on computer to another as happens now.
'The Network' will not be like the closed and semi-closed networks of now. It's not even the Internet. It is a total. It is when anything and everything will have the inherent ability to communication (share/transmit data) with every and any other thing. It more than this even; it is the circumstance when every transaction (commutative / interaction / physical / virtual) is phased as data, and this data exists: not on a hard drive, or in a certain memory device, but simply existing. Data (and therefore everything) will be ethereal. Materially speaking, eventually, the network will be everything in the scope of humanity.
Since we created computers, every 24 months, their processing speed doubles and their cost halves. If the cost halves we can by make more. If the speed doubles and cost halves we can develop the next generation faster. The growth, power, and process capability is exponential. Therefore development is exponential. So if we look back over very recent history and notice trends, we must remember this trends are not linear and therefore consider predictions in this context.
People of the Network: ‘Where Are You?’
When you sent a letter or made a call 15 years ago, it was to a place. A letter without a physical address was not delivered. The phone you dialled rand in a place where, theoretically, anyone could answer it. Now, you ring the person confident they will answer. In the email age you direct your correspondence to a person not a building. As Barry Wellman at the Centre for Urban and Community Studies, University of Toronto, puts it:
“The person has become the portal. This shift facilitates personal communities that supply the essentials of community separately to each individual: support, sociability, information, social identities, and a sense of belonging. The person, rather than the household or group, is the primary unit of connectivity … in effect, the internet and other new communication technology are helping each individual to personalise his or her own community. This is neither a prima facie loss nor gain in community, but rather a complex, fundamental transformation in the nature of community”.
A ROAR consortium (Emap Advertising, The Guardian and Observer and Channel 4) report in 2003 showed the 96% of UK 15-24 year olds owned a mobile phone ; and that many would feel socially isolated if they were deprived of the phone or internet for a fortnight.
Digital networks bring us closer to the world; it affords multiple new opportunities to immerse ourselves in representations rather than the world itself. We learn and grow through this interaction and experience. Max Frisch said that, technology is “the knack of so arranging the world that we need not experience it."
Once you digitise information, it becomes easy to duplicate by sending, copying, and disseminating. Everybody is able to be part of the network and share. Once this happens, and everything is connected, the barriers of exchanging information become lower. Everyone will have access to any piece of information. Everything can be stored as data.
It is true people previously held multiple personalities. Probably one for work one for home and one for close friends, if not many more. Online presences allowed the infinite possibility for imagined or idealistic personalities. This initial online state was short lived as people discovered it was more useful to betray elements of their personalities or persona.
With the mass adoption - and popularisation - of the Internet people no longer hold these multi-personalities. The rise of digital allows constant connectivity (an individual becomes a location, i.e. not just an object that transits between different connected* locations, but constant connectivity allows end point. People now hold one personality as online and offline cannot exists independently from each other. An individual is constantly connected.
We will have to accept that privacy as we have understood it may become a thing of the past: that we will be presented with the option of trading away access to the most intimate details of our lives in return for increased convenience, and that many of us will accept.
Plenty of observers believe that a result of this will be that the identity of the individual will increasingly be subsumed beneath that of the gigantic network of information and content – that we would become nodes in a system, recognisable only for the role we play in the greater whole, the content we provide.
“I keep six honest serving men: They taught me all I knew: Their names are What and Why and When and How and Where and Who.” Rudyard Kipling
If everything is [described as] data, important questions we must consider:
- will it be stored
- where will it be stored
- who has control of the data
- who can use the data
- what will they use it for
- and, more importantly, in a ubiquitous state, how will data truly be erased.
Now
Immediacy is the defining feature of our culture. This is a long-term social trend, closely entwined with the rise of consumerism post second world war. Digital communications further expedite the demand for now.
I am contactable, and I am findable, in the digital world. It is easy to find me, write to me, work with me, and speak to me. However, people have trouble meeting the physical me, in the physical world. I have become so findable and so contactable: I hide. Perhaps not purposely, more though the perception I do not need to be physically present, because I feel present already.
Addressing the imbalance
My work ‘Location of I” uses a smartphone from the emerging telematic generation allowing GPS location recognition , on a standard service plan with a normal telecoms service provider. Combined (via a custom server application) with an open-source geo-mapping application; I publish constantly, live, my exact physical geographical location to a distance of within three meters (talking distance). This gives access to the most intimate details of my movements.
By becoming finable – to anyone, anywhere – in the physical world, I can participate fully and with anyone: I become the absolute citizen.
I become a citizen of both the physical and digital worlds, coexisting as one (the same device that makes me visible and findable, allows continuous instant connection – communication – via any digital means); I cannot hide (and I become vulnerable).
If everything is stored and transmitted as it occurs; if everything I do is data, in 'the network', at the instant I do it; as becomes accessible; how will I exist in a physical location. I will go beyond the current state of 'being a location' (and 'end point').
I have the state to exist anywhere – and everywhere – at anytime. My previous 'states' [/actions] can be re-lived/re-played any place.
It will not be possible to destroy data (therefore anything). As every action will be augmented as data, every action will remain. Every life will remains. I will not die.
If everything I have done exists as data in 'the network'; and cannot be erased, when do I end, when do I cease to exist. Will I exist forever? Will I have reach to goal everyone dreams of: eternal existence.
This is a world where people live online – working and communicating; inhabiting online spaces – in a state of continuous connectivity, everything is done via the Internet.
We are now at the dawning of the age of ubiquitous computing. When computers are starting, no longer, to be the box on the desk or the slab warming our legs. The computer as an artifact will disappear. As they become embedded and ambient, our interaction with them will become more invisible; more human. We will become more human. (We are not there yet). But as yet, the people who will be most affected by it, the overwhelming majority of whom are non-technical, non-specialist, ordinary citizens of the developed world, barely know what will be.
A mobile phone can be switched off or left [forgotten] at home. A computer can be shut down, unplugged, and walked away from. Yet, this coming ambient, ubiquitous technology will be capable of insinuating itself into all the apertures everyday life affords it. Computers will not exists in the form we know them today. The environment will be formed in a way that current technology cannot possibly ever create.
New Information
The ‘digital revolution’ has both powered and measured by the ability to transmit, process and store information. PCs become out of date within two years of manufacture because under Moore’s Law, the power of chips to process information doubles every 18 months. According to research published in November 2003 by the University of California , more information has been created and stored in the last five years than at any time before in human history. In 2002 print, film, magnetic and optical storage media produced about five exabytes of new information. One exabyte is a billion gigabytes: somewhat over a quintillion (or ten to the eighteenth power) bytes. Five exabytes of information is the equivalent of half a million new libraries the size of the print section of the US Library of Congress, which is America’s library of record. They believe that at this current rate, 800MB of information is produced for each member of the human race each year. That would take over nine meters of books to store. Remember this is new information. It is already double what was happening three years before that; and these figures are now five years old: computer access has been on the rise and the network is forever expanding.
Perhaps we will find that a world with too much information presents as many problems as one with too little. If we can have access to everything; what do we choose to see, to use. If anything can be accessed what will the data be used for.
Connected Networks
“In addition to the formal, or semi-formal, international organizations and laws [in our world], many other mechanisms act to regulate human activities across national borders. In particular, international trade in goods, services and currencies – the global-market – has a tremendous impact on the lives of people in almost all parts of the world, creating deep interdependency amongst nations. Trans-national corporations, some with resources exceeding those available to most governments, govern activities of people on a global scale. The rapid increase in the volume of trans-border digital communications and mass-media distribution (eg, Internet, satellite television) has allowed information, ideas, and opinions to rapidly spread across the world, creating a complex web of international coordination and influence, mostly outside the control of any formal organizations or laws.”
We can already see one spatial change that digital networks have brought: that is the degree to which we are now implicitly and explicitly connected to each other. Mobile phones already do this more than anything else, now our connectedness travels with us everywhere we go. The web has evolved into an indispensable tool for our daily lives. This is the profound force that is re-shaping the way we and society act. The network of our connections is becoming woven into our physical lives.
Every item connected in the Internet requires a unique address; in a similar way buildings have postal addresses so one can be differentiated from the others. This address is called an Internet Protocol address (IP address). By virtue of extending the length of individual addresses in IPv6 to a generous 128 bits, the address space evoked becomes a staggering 2128 discrete hosts – roughly equivalent to a number that starts with the numeral 3 and continues for 38 zeros. That works out to 6.5 x 1023 for every square meter on the surface of the planet. There are quite enough addresses that every shoe, road sign, door, bookshelf and pill – in fact every item - in the world can have one of its own.
Metcalfe’s Law states that the usefulness, or utility, of a network equals the square of the number of users. In other words, the value of networked systems grows exponentially as the user population increases in a linear manner.
Ultimately, everything will be connected and interdependent. This is already becoming evident and is no longer a dream from the 1990s.
Remember computers will vastly evolve from how we know, and interact with them today. Nor will electricity be as we know today. We shall understand and harness natural, inherent, energy.
Everything will [have the possibility to] communicate with anything else. Every device and process will exist as data and will be able to flow anywhere. Once anything can communicate with everything; computing becomes ubiquitous and will become invisible. The data and the processes will be invisible. Data will no longer be transmitted. Data will simply exist. As the network will just be everything, everywhere. – ubiquitous – so will the data. There will be no need to transmit from on computer to another as happens now.
'The Network' will not be like the closed and semi-closed networks of now. It's not even the Internet. It is a total. It is when anything and everything will have the inherent ability to communication (share/transmit data) with every and any other thing. It more than this even; it is the circumstance when every transaction (commutative / interaction / physical / virtual) is phased as data, and this data exists: not on a hard drive, or in a certain memory device, but simply existing. Data (and therefore everything) will be ethereal. Materially speaking, eventually, the network will be everything in the scope of humanity.
Since we created computers, every 24 months, their processing speed doubles and their cost halves. If the cost halves we can by make more. If the speed doubles and cost halves we can develop the next generation faster. The growth, power, and process capability is exponential. Therefore development is exponential. So if we look back over very recent history and notice trends, we must remember this trends are not linear and therefore consider predictions in this context.
People of the Network: ‘Where Are You?’
When you sent a letter or made a call 15 years ago, it was to a place. A letter without a physical address was not delivered. The phone you dialled rand in a place where, theoretically, anyone could answer it. Now, you ring the person confident they will answer. In the email age you direct your correspondence to a person not a building. As Barry Wellman at the Centre for Urban and Community Studies, University of Toronto, puts it:
“The person has become the portal. This shift facilitates personal communities that supply the essentials of community separately to each individual: support, sociability, information, social identities, and a sense of belonging. The person, rather than the household or group, is the primary unit of connectivity … in effect, the internet and other new communication technology are helping each individual to personalise his or her own community. This is neither a prima facie loss nor gain in community, but rather a complex, fundamental transformation in the nature of community”.
A ROAR consortium (Emap Advertising, The Guardian and Observer and Channel 4) report in 2003 showed the 96% of UK 15-24 year olds owned a mobile phone ; and that many would feel socially isolated if they were deprived of the phone or internet for a fortnight.
Digital networks bring us closer to the world; it affords multiple new opportunities to immerse ourselves in representations rather than the world itself. We learn and grow through this interaction and experience. Max Frisch said that, technology is “the knack of so arranging the world that we need not experience it."
Once you digitise information, it becomes easy to duplicate by sending, copying, and disseminating. Everybody is able to be part of the network and share. Once this happens, and everything is connected, the barriers of exchanging information become lower. Everyone will have access to any piece of information. Everything can be stored as data.
It is true people previously held multiple personalities. Probably one for work one for home and one for close friends, if not many more. Online presences allowed the infinite possibility for imagined or idealistic personalities. This initial online state was short lived as people discovered it was more useful to betray elements of their personalities or persona.
With the mass adoption - and popularisation - of the Internet people no longer hold these multi-personalities. The rise of digital allows constant connectivity (an individual becomes a location, i.e. not just an object that transits between different connected* locations, but constant connectivity allows end point. People now hold one personality as online and offline cannot exists independently from each other. An individual is constantly connected.
We will have to accept that privacy as we have understood it may become a thing of the past: that we will be presented with the option of trading away access to the most intimate details of our lives in return for increased convenience, and that many of us will accept.
Plenty of observers believe that a result of this will be that the identity of the individual will increasingly be subsumed beneath that of the gigantic network of information and content – that we would become nodes in a system, recognisable only for the role we play in the greater whole, the content we provide.
“I keep six honest serving men: They taught me all I knew: Their names are What and Why and When and How and Where and Who.” Rudyard Kipling
If everything is [described as] data, important questions we must consider:
- will it be stored
- where will it be stored
- who has control of the data
- who can use the data
- what will they use it for
- and, more importantly, in a ubiquitous state, how will data truly be erased.
Now
Immediacy is the defining feature of our culture. This is a long-term social trend, closely entwined with the rise of consumerism post second world war. Digital communications further expedite the demand for now.
I am contactable, and I am findable, in the digital world. It is easy to find me, write to me, work with me, and speak to me. However, people have trouble meeting the physical me, in the physical world. I have become so findable and so contactable: I hide. Perhaps not purposely, more though the perception I do not need to be physically present, because I feel present already.
Addressing the imbalance
My work ‘Location of I” uses a smartphone from the emerging telematic generation allowing GPS location recognition , on a standard service plan with a normal telecoms service provider. Combined (via a custom server application) with an open-source geo-mapping application; I publish constantly, live, my exact physical geographical location to a distance of within three meters (talking distance). This gives access to the most intimate details of my movements.
By becoming finable – to anyone, anywhere – in the physical world, I can participate fully and with anyone: I become the absolute citizen.
I become a citizen of both the physical and digital worlds, coexisting as one (the same device that makes me visible and findable, allows continuous instant connection – communication – via any digital means); I cannot hide (and I become vulnerable).
If everything is stored and transmitted as it occurs; if everything I do is data, in 'the network', at the instant I do it; as becomes accessible; how will I exist in a physical location. I will go beyond the current state of 'being a location' (and 'end point').
I have the state to exist anywhere – and everywhere – at anytime. My previous 'states' [/actions] can be re-lived/re-played any place.
It will not be possible to destroy data (therefore anything). As every action will be augmented as data, every action will remain. Every life will remains. I will not die.
If everything I have done exists as data in 'the network'; and cannot be erased, when do I end, when do I cease to exist. Will I exist forever? Will I have reach to goal everyone dreams of: eternal existence.