What is information in the information age?
Every day I switch on my computer and watch as the screen lights up and the system loads to prompt me for my password.
I take this for granted.
Somewhere an oil drill boars into the ground and extracts the raw material known as crude oil.
Somewhere else a chemical is synthesized to form part of the outer rim of an industrial truck tyre.
Somewhere a power station operative is turning on her laptop to login to a Unix terminal that runs a small precise measurement application that does one job.
That same power station is connected to my laptop power supply, the truck tyre that is made from crude oil is the same truck transporting processed oil to fuel stations around the nation. We truly are living in an interconnected world. All things are related.
How do we do it?
It seems that we do it because we can send messages in the form of information at vast speeds. At some time in history messages would travel by sound or by light. The original telegraph was a system of line of sight towers that would change shape to represent symbolic messages. Way way before the western world had developed that technology, the tribal peoples of the world had devised systems of drum beats and smoke signals to carry information long distances.
It is difficult to understand how information is related to the interconnectedness of all things however the longer we look at it the more it begins to reveal itself.
Connectedness is the completion of a loop, we say we are connected when we receive a confirmation of our connectedness. When we form a closed circuit and we have a buzzer or LED, the sound or light becomes our confirmation of connectedness.
An important part of a loop when dealing with audio is a process known as feedback.
Feedback forms when the output of a connected circuit feeds back into the input alongside the original input.
I mention feedback because it is something I ponder on in relation to the interconnectedness of the world and the problems that we are dealing with.
Some of those problems seem unrelated to technology and therefore solutions don’t seem to exist in the technology sphere. However I don’t agree with that last statement and think solutions for global problems can exist in many spheres of the arts and science.
One problem I have been thinking about lately is related to social change and how global politics and corporate power is able to shift and manipulate the discussions on issues such as climate change.
In the public discussion of climate change we are presented with information that has been compiled and studied for the last 50 years or so. That information collection of data that has been gathered and studied by climate scientists and modelled on computers developed by scientists and built by engineers, is often taken for granted.
My loop has just gave me my connected confirmation.
You see we are in a feedback loop.
We require a change in our collective connectedness because the world we are interconnected with is built on the crude oil loop and the engineers who are building the world are the same engineers that design and implement the drilling of oil and the building of technology. The information we are presenting to the public is missing the whole picture. We are in a huge connected loop and we can’t just step back.
Technology and Scientific breakthroughs require the destruction of the earth. The computers and information theory required to push advancement forward requires the interconnectedness brought about by technology and scientific advancement.
The information is in a feedback loop…
