Bit Literacy - Mark Hurst [64]
Imagine you could graph the number of e-mails you receive on a given day. (This would be a good feature for a future bit-literate e-mail program.) If the graph showed the past five years, it would almost certainly slope upwards. For most users it would look like a classic “hockey stick” graph, with a rapidly rising curve ending in a near-vertical slope. The obvious question is, where does it go from here?
Consider what will happen in five, ten, or twenty years, as bits increase exponentially in the e-mail inbox, on the Web, and on phones and PDAs and other devices. Without proper training, users everywhere will face an increasingly urgent problem of overload. Now is the moment to learn bit literacy. It’s like getting in shape on a slow-moving treadmill before it speeds up to a sprinting pace.
The future will also bring new, unfamiliar bitstreams that users will be expected to create, maintain, and receive from others. This has happened before. Twenty years ago my parents hadn’t heard of e-mail, and now they’re expected to use an e-mail account, daily, to communicate with children and grandchildren, as well as friends and neighbors. Basic e-mail skills are now a social necessity for many people—but e-mail is not the last major bitstream that will arise. What bitstream will we have to master in future years that we haven’t heard of today?
A prime candidate, almost certainly coming soon to many users, is the bitstream of “life bits.” Several universities and companies (notably, Microsoft) have already started research and development of the technology. New devices will record every moment of the user’s day, every day. A mobile phone today can record a few minutes of audio, and a digital camera can take a few still images or a small amount of video; the life bitstream will be on all the time, and it will be recorded by a device that’s easy to carry—or wear—without attracting undue notice. The camera could be embedded in an everyday object, like a mobile phone. As The Economist recently put it, “In a decade’s time a typical phone will have enough storage capacity to be able to video its user’s entire life...such ‘life records’ will be used for everything from security to settling accident claims with insurance firms.”49
The life bitstream will raise new and important issues. Should it be socially acceptable, for example, to record a private conversation with a friend? How will anyone be sure that they’re not being recorded, in public or private? Storage and organization will also pose challenges for users. The sheer size of the bitstream boggles the mind; managing a photo library over several years will look trivial by comparison. The discipline of “letting the bits go” will be essential.
Most importantly, new bitstreams will raise issues of ownership. Whichever company releases the first LifeBits product will want to mediate users’ access to their life bits. Bit-literate users will know better than to fall in line and use the tool exactly as directed. I’m not predicting a grim Orwellian scenario, just noting that the user’s long-term interest is rarely the same as the corporation’s.
Ownership of bits is already an issue today, and it will become increasingly important. As discussed previously, many file formats (notably, for music) now come with DRM, or “digital rights management,” built in to prevent the user from having direct, unfettered access to the bits. Depending on one’s point of view, DRM is either a necessary tool in the enforcement of copyright law, or a gratuitous attempt by corporations to control what their customers do with purchased products.50 Either way, users should be aware of this as a bit-literate issue. Bits are truly owned by the user only when they’re...
stored on the user’s own hardware, not on someone else’s website
accessible via the file system, not locked up in an application
saved in a non-proprietary, DRM-free format like ASCII, not a proprietary format like Word.
Some companies have begun leasing access to bitstreams like music and videos, without allowing any