By SCOTT DEWING
Published: April 2005

IN THE BEGINNING there were stories and those stories were passed on from generation to generation as spoken words, flowing from mind to mind on a breath of air, a rush of sound and the miracle of language. All the information man generated was encoded in spoken language, stored in gooey gray matter and transferred via an invisible network of sound vibrations. This system was imperfect, finite and not very scalable. Human brains have a way of filtering information upon input and changing it on output. Sometimes these changes would be purposeful. Other times the details of a story were forgotten or recreated as a mere shadow of the original. Information integrity then was only as good as the person who was speaking.

The invention of writing greatly improved upon the oral tradition. Information was stored on a physical medium: clay tablets, papyrus, parchment, and stone. Writing was time-consuming and laborious though, so only the most important information was written down and stored, with those who could read and write becoming the high priests of recorded human history.

Paper, printing, and expanding literacy greatly improved the ability to create, store and transfer information. With the invention of printing, information was much more easily reproduced: a printing press could do in a day what a roomful of monks meticulously copying texts by hand could do in a year. The amount of stored information in the world expanded exponentially.

The problem with books, however, is that they have to be physically moved in order to transfer the information from one place to another. They take up space and wear out over time too. Preservation, archiving and cataloging is a daunting task that has been undertaken by legions of librarians for centuries. Even with those steadfast efforts, not everything has been recorded and stored. Information has been lost, destroyed by fires and floods, destroyed by wars. Everything isn’t stored and that which is will not last forever.

Digitization of information promises to overcome information mortality. Digitized information is cheap to store, simple to copy, and easy to transfer. The promise of the digital age is that everything can be saved, stored, and persevered. The promise is that all information will last forever.

Today, we have the capacity to save everything—every last bit and byte of information. In fact, we’ve had this capability for some years now. In 1998, available digital storage capacity exceeded the total amount of information in the world. What that means is that if we digitized all the books, paintings, photographs, audio recordings, and films that have ever been created and preserved throughout recorded history, we could store it all and still have room to spare.

Numerous projects are underway to do just that. Entire libraries are going online along with art, music and film as well. Meanwhile more and more information begins its life in digital form. In 1995 there were 23,000 websites on the Internet. Today there are an estimated 200 million, with new websites and pages being added at such a staggering rate that no one knows (or at best agrees) on the actual number nor the growth rate. Future historians looking back on the early 21st century may very well refer to it as the “Digital Deluge”.

The capability to store all information begs the question: Should we? It is often the case with technology and technological advancement that we take the “we will because we can” approach without any deeper thought about whether or not the decision we are making is a timeless one and the course we are heading down is a good one.

Information as raw data is useless. Information is useful only in the context of analysis and interpretation. Storing all the world’s information in a gigantic digital library will only be as good as the systems and methods we create for analyzing and interpreting that information. This is the next great challenge of the Digital Age.

The rise of the Internet, the exponential growth of the World Wide Web, the development of data mining and search engine technology—while impressive, these are but rumblings, mere toy models of what could be the greater capability of a information system that exists out on the fringes of science fiction and the horizon of our imagination. Imagine a system that instantly knows everything that has ever been known. Imagine a system that “learns” from the correlations and interpretation of all that collective knowledge. A system like this would approach having total knowledge. We might call it “omniscient”. Given man’s seeming propensity to worship technology, some might even call it God. Others would likely call it dangerous.

In the end, storing all information and saving everything isn’t what’s going to save the world. Our ability to analyze and understand all that information and make sound decisions is what will save and preserve us. The world is old, the Digital Age quite new. Man’s challenge, however, remains unchanged: to learn from the past and make wise decisions today that ensure a better tomorrow. Merely having more information, however, does not result in wisdom; having the right information at the right time with the right foundation for good decision making does. If architected correctly, an “omniscient” information system could be a useful guide for man as the master of his domain. If done incorrectly, however, what promises to be the enlightenment of the Digital Age could very well turn out to be more like a Digital Dark Age in which man is less like a demigod who knows and understands his universe and more like a bird that went in search of a cage.