By SCOTT DEWING
Published: September 2003

I RECENTLY LEARNED I’M GOING TO DIE.

“We’re all going to die,” you might say. “So shut up, take a number and get in line.”

True. But I know my exact day of death.

“The exact day?”

Yes. I’m going to die on Monday, April 28, 2042.

“How do you know?”

The Internet, of course.

I gathered this particular gem of delightful information at deathclock.com, a website that advertises itself as, “the Internet’s friendly reminder that life is slipping away…” At deathclock.com, you enter in your date of birth, gender, smoking status and Body Mass Index. BMI is a common medical assessment of obesity. If your weight is greater than the optimal (i.e., healthy) weight for your height, your BMI goes up. The higher your BMI, the more years taken off your life.

After you enter the required information and click the “Check Your Death Clock” button, you are presented with a pop-up window announcing “Your Personal Day of Death”, complete with a counter that counts down the number of seconds you have left to live.

At this very moment, I have 1,222,316,344 seconds left according to The Death Clock. Watching those seconds tick by makes you stop and wonder if you’re really living the life you want to live, doing the things you want to be doing—like spending time reading this column.

But wait! Don’t go yet. I only need 260 more seconds of your precious time before you run off to go climb that mountain, join the Peace Corps or whatever it is you feel compelled to do before the arrival of your own Personal Day of Death.

The truth is, I’m probably not going to die on Monday, April 28, 2042. But if you are like 52.8% of respondents in The UCLA Internet Report published earlier this year, you would believe that “most or all of the information online is reliable and accurate.” I find this statistic more disturbing than the morbid information I received at deathclock.com. The Internet is increasingly becoming an incredible source for misinformation. Every huckster, wacko and self-proclaimed expert on any topic from aardvarks to zymurgy has a website full of seemingly authoritative information.

Big media websites, such as cnn.com and nytimes.com, are no exception. The New York Times recently got a much deserved black-eye due to the actions of an ambitious and unethical reporter named Jayson Blair. Blair fabricated information in his news articles, some of which were front-page stories. Blair wasn’t the first journalist to deceive readers. Unfortunately, he won’t be the last. In short, “All the News That’s Fit to Print” may not be news at all. As more and more information is made available to us, our greatest challenge will be separating the lies from the truths, which, in all truthfulness, can be a bit tricky.

In 1948, a Bell Labs’ scientist named Claude Shannon developed and published his Mathematical Theory of Communications. Shannon’s work became the foundation for the then-emerging field of Information Theory as well as the blueprint for later advances in telecommunications, especially in the areas of data compression and error correction. His work is at the foundation of the Internet’s communication infrastructure. It’s what has allowed the Internet to grow into a global system with vast amounts of data moving efficiently and reliably at the speed of light every second.

Though steeped in complex mathematics, Information Theory is fairly simple at its core. Words are symbols used to encode messages. All communication transactions require three steps: 1) coding of the message at its source, 2) transmitting the message through a communications channel, and 3) decoding of the message at its destination.

For example, you and I are exchanging information right now. I’m encoding the information using the symbols of the English language (and some HTML under the hood). That information has been transmitted to you in the form of this website. You are now decoding the information I’ve sent you by matching it to your knowledgebase of the symbols I’ve used.

At this point, you may be asking, “So what does Information Theory have to do with more than 50 percent of folks believing that the Internet is a ‘reliable and accurate’ source of information?”

A lot; or I wouldn’t have wasted any of the 1,222,316,344 seconds I have left to live encoding it for you.

According to Shannon’s theory, the more information that is encoded in a message, the greater the chance of an error occurring either during the encoding/decoding process or during the transmission of the information.

The Internet has quickly become the largest, most complex communications medium ever created. Currently, a single strand of optical fiber the width of a human hair can transmit the informational equivalent of 90,000 encyclopedias every second. Theoretically, that same strand of fiber has the capacity to carry 100 quadrillion that amount.

Shannon’s work dealt with the mathematical and engineering aspects of transmitting messages in his quest to pack as much information into a transmission while still maintaining that information’s integrity.

But after all that information has been engineered and mathematically squeezed down into tiny bits of 0’s and 1’s carried by hidden strands of light crisscrossing oceans and continents, the final decoders of that information are human beings. Our challenge is no longer not having enough information—it’s sifting through the vast amount of information now available to us in our search for truth.

“Truth? What is truth?”

If I were Camus, I’d say, “Truth, like light, is blinding. Lies, on the other hand, are a beautiful dusk, which enhances the value of each object.”

But I’m not Camus and the truth is, I can’t tell you exactly what truth is for you. But I can tell you this for certain: blinding or not, we’re all searching for it and in our search the Internet can be a vast and useful resource. But it can also be a place for the death of truth, smothered in a glitzy and convincing shroud of lies.

Speaking of death, I may only have 1,222,230,114 seconds left now. And while this may or may not be the truth, it contains enough truth to motivate me to leave the information deluge of the Internet and the digital tick-tock of The Death Clock; to go outside into a darkening landscape of green and gray where my remaining time on this earth seems to be measured only by the falling rain.