brad brace contemporary culture scrapbook

In 2003, a group of economists and information theorists at the University of Berkeley, published their study How Much Information, one of the first systematic attempts to measure the amount of information produced and stored in all kind of media, among which digital media figure prominently. Their study shows that information is growing at an accelerating pace, doubling itself in increasingly shorter time intervals. The numbers cause dizziness and elude the human perception of quantity. A recent study by the International Data Corporation (IDC) provides further evidence that information growth is a key socio-economic development at the outset of the 21st century.

The IDC study predicts that digital information will increase more than six-fold from 161 exabytes to roughly 1000 exabytes in 2010 (1 exabyte is around 1 trillion gigabytes). There are several drivers to this information growth, including the migration of images to the digital realm and the transformation of analogue to digital information, the proliferation of mobile media like cameras and cellular phones and the spectacular circulation and duplication of information. Over the next few years, one quarter of this expanding digital universe will come from cameras and video recorders. Many organizations that rely on massive amounts of video information are trying to make it available in digital form. For example the BBC, one of the world’s biggest broadcasting companies, is planning to become ‘tapeless’ for 2010, which means it will exclusively rely on information available on digital storage.

The proliferation alone of devices of capturing, producing and diffusing information does not suffice to account for the phenomenon of information growth and its subtle implications. It is interesting to observe that organizations, major producers and containers of information, have less than 10% of their information classified. 95% of the content of the internet is unstructured data. As information grows it requires efficient ways of managing it. This is one of the reasons why information search tools like Google become fundamental ways, if we are to believe Google’s motto, of “organizing the world’s information”.

Organizing information does help people make sense of the bewildering array of data and images populating the infospaces of contemporary life. However, counter-intuitive as it may seem, ordering and editing information does not reduce but rather increases information. This happens because the organization of data items is often itself information, produced out of the rearrangement of these items. When your bank orders and sorts out your transactions, significant information about your spending habits is revealed. The rearrangement of the data items is substantially aided by the fact that digital information is always recorded and updated while its granularity makes it increasingly possible to recombine it with other information items, often across data sources.

For al these reasons, digital information is frequently crossing the boundaries of the specific domains within which it is conventionally produced and utilized. Text, image and sound become increasingly interoperable. Interoperability is a key motive behind the transformation of analogue information (low granularity, low combinability) to digital. The digital traces left out by our internet habits (surfing and shopping on the internet) are bought by commercial companies that recombine them into consumer profiles and life styles to be used for targeting promotion. Insurance companies try to combine information about individuals that is spread across different digitized sources (e.g. banks, medical records, tax returns, travel agencies, sport clubs etc) to produce individualized premiums that map the risk and life profiles of individuals. Police forces construct profiles of criminals by data mining aggregate financial transactions and other data. Examples of this sort are encountered across most domains of contemporary life. They attest to one of the most interesting characteristic of current developments, that is the production of information out of information in self-reinforcing and expanding cycles.

Less clear is the contribution, which the short-lived character of information makes to the phenomenon of information growth. Information obtains its informativeness (its value or capacity to inform) due to its adding something new to what is already known. Reciting a statement that is already known does not qualify as information, no matter how important such a statement may be. In order to be informative, information has to pick up a new fact or state and convey it. But novelty does not and cannot last. It dies out at the very moment it is consumed. Information is today becoming perishable and for that reason easily disposable. Market information, for instance, that reaches stock exchanges all over the world in terms of price changes often lasts no more than few minutes. Traffic information, so useful in the rush hours, is of no use a little later.

Information as Niklas Luhmann suggests is no more than an event, a semantic flash created against the background of memory and knowledge to which it is assimilated. In so doing however the value of information is consumed. The pending evaporation of information triggers a complex institutional game to maintain its value through a variety of mechanisms. Key among them is the ceaseless updatability of technological information and the constant expansion of the data universe it leads to. Without constant updating, stock markets, to mention the same example, around the world would collapse or become seriously impeded. Paradoxically, the more frequently information is updated the faster it becomes out-dated. Thus understood, the prevalence of information inflates the present and makes the event and its ephemeral constitution central elements of social and institutional life.

There is little doubt that a variety of objections could be raised as regards the particular methodologies employed to measure and document the growth of information. But this should not be the major point. The recent attempts to estimate the amount of information mark the growing awareness of which most of us bear a clear testimony: information and the artefacts and technologies by which it is produced penetrate deeper and deeper into the fabric of everyday life. They remake, often quite imperceptibly, a large range of everyday tasks, redefine the meaning of established practices and modes of doing things and introduce new habits and activities. Looked upon at an aggregate level and over larger time spans, these developments reshuffle the balance between things and images, objects and representations, reality and artifice. How many fictional or semi-fictional characters are really created by the algorithmic techniques of data mining and profiling (the construction of individuals out of data)? Be that as it may, the developments underlying information growth do lend empirical support to the speculative, albeit highly original, and dystopian visions of Virilio, Baudrillard and others. Technological information segments, dissolves and transposes social life to digital marks. Once a description of reality, it is increasingly becoming reality itself.

The number of governments that routinely block web sites is increasing, according to the most comprehensive survey of internet filtering yet. Meanwhile, the same study suggests that techniques for blocking undesirable content are growing ever more sophisticated.

Previous reports of government internet filtering have been limited to specific countries, such as China, Iran and Cuba, says Rafal Rohozinski, of the Open Net Initiative (ONI), which produced the report. The ONI is a partnership between the University of Cambridge, the University of Oxford, Harvard University and Toronto University.

Rohozinski says such reports have been based largely on anecdotal information and spot sampling. “This is the first attempt to create a rather comprehensive survey across a large number of countries, looking comparatively at whether they filter, what they filter and for what reasons,” he says.

In its report, the ONI states that governments in at least 25 countries regularly block access to internet sites for political, social or security reasons. It says that Burma, China, Iran, Syria, Tunisia and Vietnam filter political content, such as sites belonging to political opposition parties. Elsewhere, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Tunisia and Yemen filter for social reasons: for example by blocking access to pornography, gay and lesbian content and gambling sites.

Wider restrictions

By comparing their findings to earlier reports, the authors conclude that filtering is currently increasing worldwide. They also believe that governments are extending restrictions beyond just information websites to other online services, such as internet telephony network Skype.

Furthermore, the team discovered so-called “event-based” filtering – an upsurge in restrictions during significant political periods such as elections.

In 2006, the ONI created software that automatically visits a list of web sites and reports back to a central computer on whether the site is available. The software runs simultaneously on a computer inside a country being tested, and in another country.

This makes it possible to distinguish between active filtering and a temporary outage.

But Rohozinski adds that, in many countries, filtering probably goes well beyond what the tests reveals.

Oppressive controls

Based on other evidence, he says 16 further countries may control internet access in ways not detected by the ONI tests, for example, by arresting people who visit certain sites at internet cafes, something that has happened in Uzbekistan. “We may be understating the problem in a rather big way,” says Rohozinski

“As internet censorship and surveillance grow, there’s reason to worry about the implications of these trends for human rights, political activism and economic development around the world,” says Jonathan Zittrain, a principle investigator at the ONI.

The Internet poses little threat and literacy is rising in this vast nation.

NEW DELHI — Extra! Extra! Researchers have discovered a place where the newspaper, a threatened species in some parts of the world, is still thriving.

That would be India, home to 1.1 billion people. And not only is the press in robust health, it’s breeding at an astonishing rate.

From 2005 to 2006, nearly 2,100 newspapers made their debut in India, joining 60,000 already circulating. Here in the capital, a bustling megalopolis with 15 million residents, two new dailies have hit the streets in the last four months, angling for their share of a market already divided among more than a dozen competitors.

Why the rush to join an industry that seems to be heading for extinction in the U.S. and other developed nations?

Indian newspapers are blessed with propitious circumstances that their ailing Western counterparts can only dream of or recall with teary nostalgia.

This is a country with an expanding middle class and a booming economy, which have fueled an explosion in consumer spending and advertising. At the same time, the illiteracy rate — though still stubbornly high at an estimated 35% — is gradually coming down.

In cities such as New Delhi and Mumbai, about 80% of residents age 7 and older can read and write.

Meanwhile, Internet penetration remains marginal, despite India’s reputation as an information-technology powerhouse. Only a tiny sliver of the population, mostly well-heeled urbanites, can afford the home computers and high-speed Internet access that have punched the wind out of print media in the West.

People in the world’s biggest democracy still respect newspapers; they count on them for information and read them in numbers that would make publishers, editors and advertisers in the United States drool.

“You cannot really compare the Indian market with the market in the West,” said Subir Ghosh, the editor of Newswatch India, a website that tracks the media. “The bulk of the market is actually virgin territory, even now.”

With such a vast potential market — more than 350 million of the people who can read and write do not buy newspapers, Ghosh says — there is plenty of room, and good argument, for going after a specialized audience.

In New Delhi, four financial newspapers were vying for readers when upstart Mint, a spinoff of the mainstream daily Hindustan Times, arrived on the scene in February.

Mint has tried to separate itself from the pack with its Berliner format sized between tabloids and broadsheets, splashy graphics, livelier writing and the prestigious imprimatur of the Wall Street Journal, which may provide as much as 20% of the paper’s content. That’s the maximum allowed by law. India limits how much foreign-sourced content a news publication can put in its pages.

“A lot of business-newspaper readers felt that reading them was work,” said Raju Narisetti, Mint’s managing editor. “The whole idea [of Mint] is that business journalism can be clear and you can understand it. Clarity is the big promise that we make.”

Narisetti spent 13 years at the Wall Street Journal, which, like most big American newspapers, is struggling to hold on to readers and advertisers in the digital age. By contrast, advertising in India’s print media shot up by nearly a quarter last year, according to one estimate.

“I’ve sat here in meetings — and it’s kind of a shock — [where] the CEO pounds his fist and says, ‘Forty percent growth? You guys aren’t doing your work!’ ” Narisetti said.

In three months, his paper has built a circulation of about 80,000. (The runaway leader, the Economic Times, pegs its circulation at more than half a million.) Leavening the usual diet of market trends, corporate earnings and mergers and acquisitions are lifestyle features and chatty columns on life in New Delhi and Mumbai.

The paper’s target demographic is obvious: the 25-to-45-year-old professionals who shop in gleaming new malls, order martinis at clubs and generally move in a world that most of their parents never knew.

Among this crowd, reading a newspaper is an indicator of upward mobility.

“Most households look at it as a sign of their economic and educational progress, especially when it’s the first or second generation that’s gone to college or moved to the city,” Narisetti said. “One of the first things they do is subscribe to a paper.”

For that reason, too, Mint is in English. In spite of its colonial roots, the language of Britain is still preferred by India’s movers and shakers and its young and hip. English-language papers account for a small proportion of the nation’s newspapers but receive nearly half the advertising revenue.

The vernacular press also is growing rapidly. The nation’s bestselling newspapers are in Hindi, which is spoken by about 30% of Indians. The top Hindi dailies, Dainik Jagran and Dainik Bhaksar, boast a combined circulation of 4.3 million and a staggering implied readership of 40 million people.

Greatly helping newspaper circulation are newsstand prices that rarely exceed 3 rupees a copy, the equivalent of about 7 cents. A vicious price war several years ago suppressed prices. But thanks in part to the surge in advertising, only four newspapers out of more than 60,000 ceased publication between 2005 and 2006, according to the official Registrar for Newspapers in India.

Quantity does not equal quality. Editors here lament the shrinking pool of qualified, experienced journalists, whose salaries have risen dramatically. A mid-career reporter can earn from $1,000 to $2,000 a month. Some urban laborers are lucky to make $200.

More conservative readers complain of coarsening standards, which they see in page after page devoted to Bollywood gossip or in photographs of scantily clad young women in the popular Mumbai tabloid Midday.

Sameer Kapoor, president of Metropolitan Media Co., which recently launched the Metro Now tabloid in Delhi, makes no bones about trying to give his newspaper an edgy feel to appeal to young people who are as likely to receive news in TV sound bites or text-message alerts as they are to pick up a paper.

When the Indian government unveiled its budget in late February, many commentators agreed that it contained nothing radical. Metro Now decided to make the same point by publishing a nearly blank page to show what was new in the spending plan.

“We are not going around looking for scandals. We are not showing much skin in our pictures. Very clearly those things are not to be done. But at the same time, we are focusing on issues relating to the young,” Kapoor said.

Whether the Indian newspaper industry will eventually reach a saturation point remains to be seen. With widespread Internet access not expected for at least a decade, the traditional media are likely to continue ruling the roost. The competition is about how many newspapers the roost can fit.