I saw my friend reading a book about the explosion of data that comes with the evolution of the Internet and really those books are all plain stupid. You can’t read about information logistics: there’s no easy way to experience it short of actually working with the enormous amount of data that, simply, exists. So lets say I’ve got a printing press that has 75 wheels of letters. Each wheel has stamps of the 50 most common alphabet characters, numbers, spaces and punctuation marks used in English. Then, this printing press starts printing out every sentence that can possibly exists by combining random combinations of these 50 letters in sets of 75 characters per line. Most of the lines are utter gibberish like aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa but once in a while, it’ll say something insightful: the world will end in 2012, followed by lines that go 2013, 2014, 2015 and so on. Really, the great thing about the wealth of information isn’t it’s existence, but how it came to exist. In the David Kernell case, the server logs could have been created by anybody to frame him. What has the world come to when it accepts microscopic positive and negative charges on a plate of iron as decisive evidence in court? The value of the logs isn’t their actual content, which is quite meaningless without an interpreter. It’s the fact that these regions of electromagnetic charges just so happened to be created at a certain time in a certain place. Then, the next step is seeing that there are different tiers of value between different types of data. Server logs are fairly useless, unless your name is Sarah Palin apparently. There are books, blog posts, websites protesting schools that teach about the occult. There are stupid, obscure facebook messages that idiots write to confuse people. There are one-of-a-kind data like Boggert’s core code or maybe even some word document we had to print out for class. The combined effort of humanity to create meaningful data is so perplexing that some people just can’t resist the urge to write about it. Ultimately, you can blab all you want and list these poorly-known examples to sound smart and it really fills up volumes and volumes of utter crap but the feeling is simply not transferable. Granted, most people have never taken the time to stand back and survey the breadth of humanity’s creation but that doesn’t mean they have to. Let facebook entrap their population of idiots and forever retain their worthless data. And worthless indeed because, in the end, all of it is meaningless because even my printing press is well aware of it. see the irony? Heh.