Data Death

Got the first of my wired subscriptions which features the very timely main article about Petabytes. Indeed the amount of data streaming through the inter web everyday is staggering and mind boggling. Petabytes has become the norm in just the first decade of this new century and sifting through it has taken over as our primary responsibility. Whatever are we looking for I hope we find it soon enough and that it changes the world for the better. Law enforcement hopes to fight crime more efficiently with it while big business aims to get even richer and dominant by creating ads based on all the data they manage to decipher. Artists are remixing it like never before. Scientists who are the biggest connoisseurs of information are spellbinded by the huge free flowing binary. They sink their electronic teeth into it like hungry wolves. We are all connected to this data in one way or another. We are the kinetic contributers and consumers of the massive data streams. Every second gigabytes of information is uploaded. Every minute another million eyes absorb the world from quivering screens and yet this barely scratches the surface of the new reality. For some this massive flow of data threatens them more than nuclear bombs and terrorism while most just wants the information to be free. Neverthess we are barely aware what all this information means for us as humans in the twenty first century. Our ultimate goal in the sifting and extraction of the overwhelming sensory input is what really matters? Where will it lead us and what will we find at the end of the information age?