We are living in the age of information overload, where we have access to 1,200 petabytes (1PB= 1000000000000000B =1015 bytes =1000 terabytes) of data contained within the main cyber storage companies including Google, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft. This excludes other companies such as DropBox, and does not take into consideration information existing on the DarkWeb. According to the Washington Post, it would take approximately 305.5 billion pages to print the whole Internet.
The internet grows in leaps and bounds by the second, and our capacity for computing grows with it. The information which exists at the touch of our fingertips would be more of a burden than an aid if it were not accessible in an easy, affordable and organised way. The efficiency of search engines and news feeds means that artificial intelligence and computers have outperformed the human brain, such that instead of actively searching for information, we can passively absorb it.
On October 25th, 2016, I attended a lecture by Professor Angela Philips at Goldsmith’s University entitled ‘On Bubbles and Streams: News Audiences in the Era of Social Media’. During the lecture, Philips explained how the ‘Spiral of Silence’ can be transferred to social media. She argued that news audiences interpret news based on their own prior experiences, and that news is selected for us based on our friends and prior decisions. People are now seeing only what they already like. People are less likely to venture their views online than at a dinner table, which reinforces a sense of solidarity in their online bubble. In a social media bubble; influencers, politicians and marketers can share information, even fake news, which will be reinforced by their followers, as people with opposing views are excluded from the bubble.
Despite all of this, as trust in news corporations declines, social networks are becoming more reliable as news sources. The future of news, however, is not set in stone. With 7 billion people on the planet and ever increasing connectivity, our news network will grow and evolve. Crowdsourced news is real-time, on the ground news, delivered directly by witnesses and thereby making it more trustworthy than representations of the news through news channels. Social networks have adapted their purpose to be platforms for crowdsourced news. The future of news is tied to the development of social media.
The Industrial age, very much an age of atoms, gave us the concept of mass production, with the economies that come from manufacturing with uniform and repetitious methods in any one given space and time. The information age, the age of computers, showed us the same economies of scale, but with less regard for space and time. The manufacturing of bits could happen anywhere, at any time, and, for example, move among the stock markets of New York, London, and Tokyo as if they were three adjacent machine tools. In the information age, mass media got bigger and smaller at the same time. In the post-information age, we often have an audience the size of one. Everything is made to order, and information is extremely personalized. In the same ways that hypertext removes the limitations of the printed page, the post-information age will remove the limitations of geography. Digital living will include less and less dependence upon being in specific place at specific time, and the transmission of place itself will start to become possible. (Negroponte, 1995)
The opportunities created by the explosion of the internet and social media have been endless and extraordinary. We can move past the age of information, into the age of knowledge, if we use these tools for our benefit rather than allowing ourselves to be used by them.
References:
Negroponte, Nicholas. 1995. Being Digital. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
This blog is a project for Study Unit MCS3953, University of Malta.
