A few fingers in
the air can be interpreted in many different ways. A sign of victory. a symbol of evil, an insult (visar med fingrar i luften).
But many more times will they represent something much less intriguing like a
number. If I raise three fingers in the air like this. It means three. Now
latin for finger is digitus. So digitalization of knowledge or information
means that it is packaged as numbers.
To package knowledge as numbers has turned out to have consequences. Since
world war two, more and more information has been digitalized in order to be automatically
processed in computers. Soon the effects were noticed, for instance in
meteorology delivering improved weather forecasts relying on these new tools to
calculate movements in the atmosphere. Later, the same technology was used to
put Americans on the Moon. Nowadays, there no longer seem to exist information
or knowledge that cannot be expressed as numbers.
But digitalization is also something more, a transformative social and
cultural process with elusive repercussions. We have tried to develop digital
information processing since at least the 17th century. Then, the idea
caught on of the universe as a clockwork with regular movements which could be
calculated in advance. God had created the world and was the prime mover. But divinity
was no longer needed to make the world turn just as the watchmaker who had made
the clock, was no longer needed to keep it ticking in the pockets of the
wealthy.
This mechanistic worldview brought new perspectives on reasoning. Rational
thinking could also be understood in terms of predictable claims and
propositions and thus potentially the object of the same type of analyses as
the clockwork universe. Thinking was compared to calculating. Advanced
mechanical computing machines were constructed as was chess-playing automata, both expressing the view of thinking
as something regular and deterministic. [NEW] Some of the greatest minds of
this time tried to create a calculus that could be used to crank out all the
possible logical truths there were, a rational language clean from all
incorrections and lies.
As I mentioned, from
world war two, computers provided new possibilities to begin realizing the
dreams of the 17th-century mechanists of a perfect language free
from errors and mistakes.
And when internet was developed from the late 1960s, it started to become possible to make large amounts of digital information available simultaneously to innumerable connected computers.
During more recent decades, smaller and lighter portable computers have been equipped with advanced radio technology while cell phones have transformed into computers relying on generation after generation of mobile telecommunications technologies. Consequently, many people today have access to enormous amounts of information also when they are away from home or work. The potential uses seem endless.
During past centuries, following the introduction
of the printing press in the 15th century, information has been
symbolized by books and libraries. Knowledge was contained on paper and in printed
texts. Retrieving information was the same as looking through collections of paper.
No matter if it was a Shakespeare quote or a pancake recipe. But digitalization
seems to slowly change all that. We talk about storing something in cyberspace
or in the cloud. If information used to be bound up in paper and ink, it
nowadays seems to float freely in space. Today, the view of information is that
it flows frictionless from one device to another. Information has become
remarkably immaterial.
But this is a misconception. In fact, quite a
lot of hardware is needed to move digital information from one place to
another, satellites, base stations, cables and optical fiber to mention just a
few. Take the research facility MAX IV here in Lund. One of their main problems
right now is how to get the channel capacity needed to move the thousands of terabytes
each experiment generates to where it is to be analyzed. In Luleå in northern Sweden, a well-known American social platform
has built a big data centre because of the relatively cheap hydropower which in
combination with the chilly climate guarantee reasonably high energy efficiency
for their servers.
One of the main advantages when digitalizing
information is nevertheless that it can be copied and spread much simpler,
cheaper and more reliably than before. Where earlier a big copy machine was needed
to produce bad copies of a book or a photograph, or advanced video equipment was
needed to reproduce a film, and, more importantly, every generation of copies
had lower quality than the preceding generation, digital copying is simple and it
creates perfect copies.
It is of course well known how this feature of
digital information has made it very easy to copy and spread information. You
can ask anyone in the music or film industry, or any newspaper journalist. This feature of digital information
has had consequences also for research, primarily perhaps by facilitating the process of making research results as well as
research data open and accessible. The demands for Open Access and Open Data as this is called is often
connected to the broader ideology, which since the 1960s has acted under the
slogan “Information wants to be free”. Today, research funders often promote ideas
of Open Access and Open Data by demanding that the research they fund is
published in open-access formats and that the data it generates is equally
available to anyone.
Taken together, it is today rather easy to
acquire information and to some extent even knowledge without having to get to
a certain location such as a library or an archive. To remember things is no
longer very important since virtually anything can be looked up. If you are a
historian like I am, there are of course many things that are still not on the
net despite large multinational companies in the information business doing
their very best to scan books and other prints from all over the world and all
times and likewise archival material of any origin. For copyright reasons, many
of these databases are closed to a large number of people. Sometimes, they can
be opened for those who are willing to pay and today, research libraries as
well as public libraries are spending larger and larger sums on digital
databases.
In this way, demands for Open Access and Open
Data are countered by commercial interests investing in the construction of
databases that are accessible only to those who pay for them. In my own field of history of ideas, admission to a database can be
purchased containing, say all published 18th-century texts in
English fully searchable. With access to this database, it is relatively easy to publish research
articles based on searches for terms such as “Manure” and then crank out
publications on the development of sustainable agriculture in the 18th
century. Just as in the natural sciences and medicine, it has become possible
to buy expensive digital research infrastructure to boost the production of
research publications and career advantages when innovativeness is lacking.
Taken together, the strive for Open Access and
Open Data as well as the simultaneous commercialization of searchable data has
consequences for research. Not only are competitive advantages in research more
often relying on expensive research infrastructure such as big machinery or
large populations of test animals, which can be used to create new or better
datasets, or by commercial databases. It also seems as if creativity and
originality, the stuff that cannot be collected in datasets or programmed into
algorithms, at least not yet, that creativity and originality is becoming a
more decisive edge when all the rest needed to produce truly salient research
is either openly accessible or for sale.
Digitalization
of data has thus created two somewhat contradictory trends. First, one where
the ability to pay for information has improved the possibilities to pursue a
research career relying on routinized efforts even though more and more
research results and data are open and freely accessible. Second, one where the
generally boosted access to results and data has made originality and creativity
high in demand.
We know today that it took several centuries for the art of printing to
be established as a new technology transforming information management. The
consequences of digitalization will certainly be as great as those of the
printing press. But although some of the signs of its impact are already showing
today, it will most likely be several decades or even centuries until we will
be able to fully understand all its consequences. If future research will be
characterized by expensive databases or by Open Access and Open Data is for
instance still an open question.
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