That's a lot of talk.
I referred to the Soundkeeper in Norton Juster's The Phantom Tollbooth
seven years ago, in a very different context.
But I was reminded of her again when I encountered a
report on a recent study that appeared in the News section of the online edition
of the highly respected scientific weekly Nature.
As Milo learns as he visits her in order to steal a sound, the Soundkeeper archives,
in neat and orderly containers, all the sounds ever made in the world:
They entered a tiny cagelike elevator and traveled
down for fully three quarters of a minute, stopping finally in an immense vault,
whose long lines of file drawers and storage bins stretched in all directions
from where here began to where there ended, and from floor to ceiling.
"Every sound that's ever been made in history is kept here," said
the Soundkeeper, skipping down one of the corridors with Milo in hand. "For
instance, look here." She opened one of the drawers and pulled out a small
brown envelope. "This is the exact tune George Washington whistled when
he crossed the Delaware on that icy night in 1777."
The report in Nature, accessed via the Emerging
Tech blog on ZDNet, ostensibly reports that a study of instant messaging habits
offers yet another verification of the Six Degrees of
Separation thesis. But the degrees of separation, or of connectedness, wasn't
what caught my eye. I was amazed by the vastness of the data collected for the
study:
According to Nature in ‘Six degrees of messaging,’
computer scientists at Microsoft Research Redmond lab have logged a full month
of instant messengers using — logically — Microsoft Messenger. ‘The compressed
dataset occupies 4.5 terabytes, composed from 1 billion conversations per day
(150 gigabytes) over one month of logging,” according to the researchers. The
dataset which was collected in June 2006 contains summaries of 30 billion conversations
among 240 million people.
One billion conversations per day! It seems like an immense number, though if
we consider that there are more than six billion people on the planet, and that
each of us probably takes part in tens of "conversations" each day,
those 150 daily gigabytes may not really be that much. Except that, other than
in The Phantom Tollbooth, nobody is saving all those conversations, whereas
conversations conducted via Messenger are being saved, and are contributing
to the vastness of the saved information/data that engulfs us.
Go to: Look Ma, I'm on (surveillance) camera!,
or
Go to: Holding on / Letting go.