I have to work with a lot of information for my various vocational, avocational and just plain personal activities. Curiosity hasn’t been the death of me (yet) but it sure has made my life interesting. On the up side, I get to learn a lot of new things. On the down side, dealing with all the information coming across my computer screen (not to mention TV, conversations and reading) is not easy. Some days it can be downright overwhelming.
But where is all this data coming from? What’s causing all the daily “noise?”
I recently enjoyed a book called Meganets by David B. Auerbach, a writer, technologist and software engineer. This book, subtitled How Digital Forces Beyond Our Control Commandeer Our Daily Lives and Inner Realities, is an intensive, well-researched deep dive into the history of information in the lives of humans, from early days to the present. He covers such topics as bitcoins, internet, social media, and all things info related. Auerbach doesn’t pull any punches. He is also pretty balanced in his appreciation of the benefits of today’s data collection and his concerns about what harm our technology may cause in the future, having already caused significant upheaval in the world’s societies.
I had read the introduction, in which he pointed out the primary concerns he would be covering, but I was still not prepared for the following bombshell:
“As recently as fifty years ago, the overwhelming majority of people’s lives went undocumented and unrecorded. It wasn’t data but simply life. We possessed neither the means to codify most of our lives as data, nor the resources with which to analyze and store it.
Things have changed…Every single day, we now produce more computational data than was produced in the entire history of humanity up until the year 2000.*”
*SINTEF, “Big Data, for Better or Worse: 90% of World’s Data Generated over Last Two Years,” ScienceDaily, May 22, 2013, https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/05/130522085217.htm
Yikes! No wonder we’re drowning in it! Note: This was posted over 10 years ago. Think about how much the problems have grown/evolved over time. Again I say – Yikes!
You gotta read this book if you’re wondering what’s going on info-wise. You’ll learn so much…
Wordz By Linda Bond 
Possibly for youth it is natural, however, I find myself, a senior, taxed to keep up with all of it.
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I think many younger folks have learned to just breeze through a post or message – everything is done in short phrases, etc. If we don’t really try to engage with anything in depth, it takes lots of time and attention. Some of us are from a time when we did look at things in detail, and it’s a hard “habit” to break.
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