Get IT Done - Lost for Words

Lost For Words

All social animals communicate. Humans have taken it to a whole new level. Our civilization is dependent on our ability to communicate. But how did we get here, and where will it take us?

Creatures communicate with various strategies, smell, movement, light, and sound. While much of our communication is non-verbal, we specialized in creating verbal symbols - words. While the spoken word is powerful, it is transient. If you are not there to perceive the propagating sound waves, there is no communication.

Because spoken communication fails across space and time, we altered physical objects to hold information using “tally sticks” or knotted strings. Most early data recording focused on business activities like managing herds and tracking debt.

We expanded our communicative power by adopting new symbols. By pressing these symbols into wet clay tablets your ancestor could communicate stories across space and time.

We then adopted even more flexible symbols of writing – words made of letters. However, as with clay tablets, writing’s value was constrained by the need for manual reproduction which was addressed by Johannes Gutenberg’s Press. We could now inexpensively propagate ideas across the planet and across generations. We began to immortalize data.

While written symbols enabled distant minds to recreate events, audio and video recordings communicate the actual event. These mediums changed the world dramatically but, as analog constructs, they also required reproduction on physical media for dissemination.

The advent of digital reproduction exponentially changed that paradigm. With a click of a button, you can share a video with millions. The ability to connect then drove the ubiquitous adoption of recording devices.

Cameras and audio recording devices (e.g., Alexa) are everywhere. Knowingly or surreptitiously most of your life is now immortalized digitally. Your interests, your purchases, your communications, your movements.

Purveyors of digital services harvest that data. Have you experienced a situation where you discuss an esoteric subject only to begin receiving ads, links, and new stories about that subject? You may tell yourself that it is coincidental, but it may happen all too often for statistical probability.

Alexa and your phone are always listening. Digital providers ostensibly harvest your data to provide you a “better experience”. But everything we do and say may be recorded. If you carry a mobile phone – and who doesn’t – all your movements are tracked and stored in “the cloud”.

Mixed blessing? On the one hand, crime may plummet. The authorities can identify who was at a place in time through cell phone meta-data. With cameras everywhere (businesses, street corners, dash-cams, bodycams and in everyone’s hands) your activities are always being recorded. Artificial intelligence engines can sort and filter vast amounts of locational data, audio, and video to quickly paint a scenario.

We may have lost any hope of anonymity.

I was lucky enough to have grown up in the “old world”. A time when society recorded information on paper but had no inexpensive way to widely disseminate that information. While my past transgressions remain mercifully sequestered in the mists of human memory, the activity of our progeny is digitally recorded and stored online in an easily interrogatable medium. Today, the statements and actions of youth will follow them all the days of their lives.

Children are now raised in a society inured to the shadow of our digital “Big Brother”. They will understand that, like their actual siblings, this Big Brother is happy to share their transgressions and mistakes with the world. Perhaps they will not care.

Our memories are low fidelity. We forget years and remember moments. In our new reality, all our thoughts and actions are recorded in exquisite high fidelity, whether we want them to be or not. These recordings will be held in perpetuity and immediately available to anyone on the planet. The only escape is to cease participating and drop out of society.

Hasten slowly and Think About IT!

Tony Keefe, COO, Entre Computer Services www.entrecs.com