I’ve been offline for ca. 2 days – staying in a hotel which dates from the days of Mae West (she stayed there) but where the internet only works in one place if you hide under the bed.
The closing plenary from Marc Smith at CNI
Microsoft Research
Community Technologies Group
Community Technologies Group
– I didn’t catch all of it but it included – everything we do leaves tracks in the digital sand. No privacy. We know that anyway. But our total world line is about 10 terabytes. That’s what an ipod will be in a few years’ time. So we have the opportunity to record the comple world history from now on. Vannevar Bush’s memex is in sight.
Marc put forward the vision that we’ll carry this information environment with us and that when we meet other people of machines we’ll exchange bytes – rather like pheromones – we get to know all about the beings we interact with. This is a common theme in SF – one’s memory is portable, dowloadable and reloadable.
At the JISC NSF meeting (more later) we also talked about our information environment. The conventionalists see this tied to the institutional repository – where one’s output is collected and disseminated. But I’d rather keep it with me – I’ve had 6 email addresses in the last 15 years and every time I change I lose huge amounts of information. I’d rather keep it with me and trade bits of it with any employer.
In the future we won’t put people in prison, we’ll just remove their terabytes and bandwidth.