drowning in data

There is a tsunami of data that is crashing onto the beaches of the civilised world. This is a tidal wave of unrelated, growing data formed in bits and bytes, coming in an unorganised, uncontrolled, incoherent cacophony of foam. It's filled with flotsam and jetsam. It's filled with the sticks and bones and shells of inanimate and animate life. None of it is easily related, none of it comes with any organizational methodology. ...The tsunami is a wall of data -- data produced at greater and greater speed, greater and greater amounts to store in memory, amounts that double, it seems, with each sunset. On tape, on disks, on paper, sent by streams of light. Faster and faster, more and more and more.
Richard Saul Wurman, Information Architects

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The space of the infosphere is a homogeneous space of aimless, instantaneous delivery of everything in all directions simultaneously. It has one dimension: raw data, the matter filling cyberspace, a matter that is inert by virtue of overactivity. The human body risks drowning in the unformed sea, if it does not select from the incoming flow, process the selected material..., and direct a transformed flow back out into space in a calculated way.... The body must transform raw data-matter into profit-by-information squared. It must order and organise, it must form the formless...
Brian Massumi, Interface and Active Space: Human-Machine Design

 

 

 

Throughout human history the development of new communications media has increased the sum of knowledge and ideas that can be communicated and stored. However, with the development of each new medium, the problem of accessing this information has intensified.

When the preliterate Ancient Greeks raised oratory to an artform, they also had to develop technologies to assist orators to mentally organise, store and access the contents of their speeches. The development of writing took the pressure off individual memories, but raised new problems of physical storage and access.

The development of personal and state archives and libraries was a partial solution to a problem that became more acute with the invention of the movable-type press. The resulting flood of published material forced the development of new means of organising and accessing information. These ranged form the development of publishing conventions such as page numbers, tables of contents and indexes to archiving conventions such as catalogues, card indexes and the Dewey System.

The '90s saw what may be the most significant growth in communications since Gutenburg knocked together the movable-type press in the mid-15th Century. Built on an existing infrastructure of telecommunications wiring, and made possible through rapid advances in digital technologies from the '60s onwards, the Internet and, more particularly, the World Wide Web, proved to be the 'killer app' of the decade.

The World Wide Web (WWW) and its associated Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP) were designed to retain the positive aspects of network decentralisation whilst providing users with a simple interface to access content and content-creators with a relatively easy and flexible way to produce, store and distribute their content. The development of the World Wide Web, with its storage nodes and hyperlinks, its formatable text and ability to support images, sound and movement has been so successful that available urls (uniform resource locators) now number in the billions.

The Internet is now a meta-medium; absorbing, reconfiguring and re-presenting all existing media whilst continually spawning hybrid and new offshoots. A loose translation of a Chinese term for the Internet, "ten thousand dimensional web in heaven and net on earth", conveys the multidimensional, amorphous and ubiquitous growth of the medium.

New uses and new representational and communication technologies for the Internet are constantly being developed. These include real-time chat and chatterbots, VRML, virtual worlds and Multi User Domains, networked games, personal teleconferencing, etc. New communities, based on shared interests rather than geographical proximity, quickly arose and new types of community are developing on-line. A user can monitor their children and household security, restock their refrigerator, medical supplies and wardrobe, built relationships and have sex, research special interests or publish their own obsessions, pay their bills and manage their finances, blow up aliens or re-fight World War II, collaboratively work with others thousands of kilometers away... all without leaving their own computer.

As the Internet continues to grow at an almost exponential rate we are increasingly suffering from the stress of dealing with the onslaught of data -- of finding what we want, of organising it, of understanding it. This stress is exacerbated by the lack of generalised navigational conventions such as the print-world has developed. With printed material we have a well developed set of accepted cues for finding the text we require and then for finding our way around it. These form a metastructure which includes everything from library cataloguing conventions, bibliographies etc., to the visual cues provided by design and organisation (title page, table of contents, page numbers, footnotes, headers, quotations, index, etc), to the more subtle stylistic conventions of genre. In the last few years the vocabulary of print has been reapplied to the computer medium, nowhere more so than on the World Wide Web.

However a web site is fundamentally different from a printed publication and in no way more so than in the one feature, the nonlinear link, that defines its unique value as a means of communication -- and which simultaneously provokes anxiety and exhaustion. In its current form (simple text/image-to-window links), all choices seem equal and the same -- and therefore random and incoherent. Any system which can limitlessly link material risks overloading the user with choice, crippling efforts to navigate meaningfully through them.

The act of naming and applying metaphors is the first step in the process of creating coherence from chaos. The nonlinear and geographically-dispersed environment implicit in the the Internet's physical development early evoked spatial images (e.g. cyberspace, the matrix, and the Information Superhighway), which have reflected the hopes and attitudes of those planning to exploit the Internet. Users, on the other hand, often spontaneously draw upon maritime analogies, perhaps reflecting the sense of being flooded by and drowning in the sheer volume of material. However, as Paul Harris has pointed out, the actual experiential reality of the Internet has remained flatland.

If we think of the imaginative space of the network as a map onto which aesthetics and consciousness are projected, it would appear that language fans out onto flat surfaces; it is deployed in chains of metonymous units, and becomes a sequence of transcriptions that the user juxtaposes and skims, if not simply skips. Not only is it flat and not only are there no maps to orient ourselves with, but the very nature of the current organisation and presentation of material on the Net may in fact be discouraging deeper engagement beyond skimming the surface.

Paul Harris in HYPER-LEX: A Technographical Dictionary

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The Internet is Rhizomatic