Not
so long ago people used to go to the temples and
places that they considered as sacred. They
used to pray for miracles expecting some kind of
alleviation for their pain and suffering. The access to
information was limited to the hands of few men who knew
exactly how to keep control of the truth and
people`s faith. Information was manipulated
by a minority who decided of keeping
men and women deepen in ignorance and darkness for
ages. But the access to Information slowly started
to be spread to the world by
some few courageous people who risked themselves of
being burned alive in public fire pit.
After being living in a Platonic cave for centuries, accepting the
reality showed by shadows as the only truth, some
brave men challenged the established system and
learned the way out of the cave taking the risk to embrace a new
reality. In modern times, Google is the new miraculous temple, where
people can go when they need answers and remedy for their
suffering. A
reality based on information which everyone can decide what accept or
not. And like a powerful virus the will for information was
contaminating everyone by some new tools of dissemination and forcing
to choose between being in ignorance and darkness and praying for
answers or learn how to adapt and to access the new power.
Information became the new master in recent times. You are what you
read. The atoms of the new reality is bits. Objects
used in the past to store information like rock tablets, papyrus and
books which were very useful, are no longer capable to keep such a
huge amount of data which we generated every day. New technologies
were needed to be invented for this task. Nowadays the new reality is
constituted by bits. Where:1000 bytes = one kilobyte (KB); 1000
KB = one megabyte (MB);1000 MB = one gigabyte (GB);1000 GB = one
terabyte (TB);1000 TB = one petabyte (PB);1000 PB = one exabyte
(EB);1000 EB = one zettabyte (ZB);1000 ZB = one yottabyte (YB).
According to IBM: 2.5 exabytes of data was generated every day in
2012. But how much of these data were really usefull?
The
technology developed to store information in recent times is really
fascinating. For instance, the capacity of a human being's functional
memory is estimated to be 1.25 terabytes or the equivalent of the
memories of 800 human beings fitting into one petabyte. If
a person decides to belong to the modern society, the person should
not resist being involved in the massive power which Information
mechanisms achieved on people`s life. Each part of the planet
is connected to some powerful information centre and "resistance
is futile", according to the Borgs from Star Trek series.
Assimilation is the new rule. But between so much infinitely data
how to decide and choose what we should assimilate or not is the key.
How to know the discernibility of the "I" of the useful
information from the useless data must be clear if we want avoid the
accumulation of rubish in our minds. We are in the centre of an
invisible information war between the big information corporations.
Facebook and its "mates" are deciding our past, our present
and what will be our future. They are in charge of our footsteps and
they know each movement we are going to do next. We are being
observed all the time by virtual eyes.