We’re drowning in data
As more facts wash over us, we absorb less and less
I’ve always been a bit of a hoarder when it comes to paper, especially in my legendary messy office. But nowadays I’ve got lots of company, because everyone else is hoarding vast amounts of junk, too — only you can’t see it.
It’s electronic hoarding, and many messes are way bigger than mine.
For starters, everyone hoards photos because the average person takes more shots in a month than the whole planet did 50 years ago. Go to a rock concert and there are more camera flashes than lighting effects, more cellphones click-click-clicking than musical notes.
An estimated 2.5 trillion shots are taken worldwide every year, with almost 100 billion posted on Facebook alone. The other 2.4 trillion wind up lost in people’s phones or computers, never to be seen again.
“You want to see our 2009 Christmas photos, honey? Oh dear — I don’t know if they’re in the big computer, the laptop, the iPad, my phone or my old Apple 3. They might even be in the camera — wherever that is.”
Parents have 13,000 photos of their three-year-olds, but will their kids ever see them or care? Still, we can’t bring ourselves to delete them, so we keep on shooting and compiling more. Eventually everyone will inherit a Smithsonian library’s worth of e-photos from their childhood.
Bing! Bing! Bing! That’s the sound of another layer of hidden hoarding, our email. We once erased each old message to make room for new ones, but now our computers have infinite space, so why bother? I know people with six email accounts, 100,000 messages and 4,000 Facebook friends sending them more messages and tweets all the time. But they have no one to meet for dinner.
We are deluged by data on all sides. Ping, ping, ping go our computer news alerts, stock reports, sport scores, weather forecasts and … oops, there’s my latest Google alert!
Science alert: New app will track approaching meteors on your phone!
International alert: At least 80 per cent of fire detectors are non-functional in Mumbai.
Alvin Toffler invented the term “information overload.” But we store 2,000 times more data now than we did in 2004, let alone when Toffler was writing in 1970.
Yet our data-saving is just starting. Endless new programs now let us record the most microscopic details of our lives. There are 24-7 health apps that measure every footstep and breath we take, every calorie we consume, every heartbeat we live so we’ll have a permanent record of it.
New bathroom scales measure your weight, body fat, body water, bone mass and muscle mass, then wirelessly beam it to your computer so you can forever prove there was one day when you weighed only 79.9 kilograms.
The Personal Sleep Coach measures every detail of your sleep — from minutes awake to deep sleep, REMs and how often you yawned and snored. That way you can compare last night’s sleep with the one you had Dec. 19 and the one you’ll have June 19, 2017.
There’s a fast-growing army of “life loggers,” data freaks who obsessively record absolutely everything for posterity. A standard entry is: “I got up at 6:20 a.m. after 4.7 hours sleep. Woke five times during the night, urinated twice. Heart rate 61 beats per minute, blood pressure 121/74, blink rate once every 4.3 seconds.”
We are drowning in data. Experts call this “infobesity” and recommend a “data diet.” They say the more data washes over us, the less we take in.
Safari guides complain tourists get so absorbed trying to frame the elephant perfectly in their cameras that they never actually see the elephant. It’s like parents obsessively filming their kid’s school play that they only see through the viewfinder.
In California, they’ve set up digital detox retreats where you spend several days unwired, cut off from all information. You can’t even take photos of the experience.
But data march on. The latest hoarding device is Memeto, a mini-camera that hangs around your neck and clicks a photo every 30 seconds, so you can record your entire life 247. Then you electronically insert your day’s emails, tweets, personal health data and “daily diary” reflections in a kind of life scrapbook.
Life-loggers say this creates a permanent record of your life, a modern version of the tombs of the pharaohs, where memories of you exist for all time.
When your life is over, your digital life will remain so your great-great-great-granddaughter can spend days or years going through it and discover who her ancestor was.
But I suspect that like the photos hoarded in our cameras, no one will ever look at this stuff again, including you.