Faster : Book Recommendation

I just finished reading another great book by James Gleick titled Faster : The Acceleration of Just About Everything. Having read The Information and Genius, I have become a fan of the way that Gleick streams together collections of concepts, wraps them up and gifts them so lucidly.

While the book deals with the quickening pace of our day to day lives and our obsession with efficiency (sometimes unrationally), one chapter, Short Term Memory, gave me a few chuckles and a pause for thought.

"Anyone wandering through the Internet might begin to feel that memory loss isn't the problem. Archivists are everywhere, in fact - official and self-made. The leading on-line bridge service has recorded every detail of the bidding and card play in each of the millions of hands played since the early 1990s. Likewise, any silly message that you broadcast to a Usenet newsgroup is now being stored, for eternity or some approximation thereof, by a variety of commercial services. No matter that you gave your last posting a mere five seconds' thought; you should be prepared to hear your biographer read it back to you in your dotage. Most people, unfortunately, don't have posterity in mind when they fire off their little notes. Internet communication seems so spontaneous and personal. Will people really want future employers to dig up all the messages they've been posting to alt.dead.porn.stars and soc.support.depression.manic? Sometimes, as the years go by, privacy demands a gentle forgetfulness."

I think Gleick hits on something interesting here. Just as the efficiency and rate of change of our inventions is increasing throughout time, so too does our adopted philosophies and thoughts. Should we be held accountable for something we said 20 years ago? And more importantly, do we still believe what we said 20 years ago? It's often hard to accurately remember context, detect sarcasm, or put ourselves into the exact mindset that we were in when we made those comments in the relatively distant past. As much as Ray Kurzweil would like it to be true, we are still quite far off from archiving consciousness (or understanding what consciousness really is for that matter).

If these comments were made in a face to face unrecorded conversation, surely there is some attrition to be expected of our memories as time goes by. Why should we be so harsh when it comes to judging someone on their archived content? I think it brings up an interesting concept of morality being time invariant. What was wrong then is wrong now and will be wrong in the future. The important distinction is that we must adapt and adopt new philosophies in light of new evidence. If we can't forget the people we once were, then we must certainly learn to forgive.

"In the world before cyberspace, countless bridge hands were played and words spoken, and the memory vanished like vapor into the air. All that information, dissolved no sooner than it was formed. "

Although Faster was published in 1999 -- the Usenet reference should tip that hand -- it remains very relevant to a lot of the discussion of today.

"The biggest proprietor of archivable data is the federal government, struggling to preserve the records it generates daily on an uncountable scale."

One can't help but think of the criticism surrounding the NSA, PRISM and just the collection of our data in general.

While I've highlighted this one chapter, the real essence of this read is in the brief yet rich history of the bend in the exponential growth curve for our task management abilities that we have experienced over the past 100 or so years. It's a great read and I hope you'll check it out.