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“I am the magical mouse / I don’t eat cheese / I eat sunsets / And the tops of trees.”–Kenneth Patchen from the first stanza of “The Magical Mouse” published in 1952.

The Guardian came up with some absolutely incredible data. I found it quoted in the Globe and Mail’s Social Studies column written and compiled by Michael Kesterton. “Last year, enough digital information–from e-mails and blogs to mobile phone calls and photos and TV signals–was generated to fill a dozen stacks of hardback books stretching from Earth to the sun.” This information came from the technology consultancy IDC. Think about it. In technology terms that’s 161 billion gigabytes. They’ve actually come up with the term, “exabytes.” Consider this as well.. “The sheer amount of data that has been created by the digital age becomes clear when comparing it with the spoken word. Experts estimate that all human language stored since the dawn of time would take up about five exabytes if stored in digital form. In comparison, last year’s e-mail traffic accounted for six exabytes.” Not five …but six! Is it any wonder that some of those e-mails go astray or get lost in the sheer load of “0’s” and “1’s” flying through cyberspace.

Sometime back, I read that there were more than 800 million pages available for viewing on the internet. Add one more for the page you’re reading right now…

 According to the journal Nature and once again the Social Studies column of the Monday September 27th, 1999 issue of the Globe and Mail, “Any two randomly chosen web pages are, on average, only 18.59 clicks away from one another. The average web page contains seven links.” In 1990, John Guare, wrote, “Everybody on this planet is separated by only six other people. Six degrees of separation. Between us and everybody else on this planet.”

It was Canadian writer William Gibson who coined the phrase “cyberspace.” I’ve often wondered if he gets any residuals for its overuse.

I really believe that it was the film “2001” that may have been the origin of the term “com” that we know now as “dot com.” If not the true origin then it was probably the first to present it to a mass audience. If you look carefully at the screens of “Hal,” the highly sophisticated 9,000 computer aboard the spaceship going to the outer planets in the solar system, you will see the terms “com” and even “ATM” coming up from time to time. We may not have progressed as far in the 21st century as Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke envisioned when the film was released in 1968, but they were way ahead of the mark with terms that would be part of our everyday language. Listen for these words around you in your workplace or even at home.

I recently did a program based around the Star Trek phenomena. In one episode of The Next Generation, the Enterprise is having its computer system upgraded. The beings in charge of the upgrades communicate in English with the crew but communicate with each other in computer language. It’s not such a stretch of the imagination to consider the possibility that one day we might give up the spoken word in favor of a direct mind link with our computers. ..And then there will be seven “exabytes…”

In another episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, we see an open book under glass in the ready-room off the main bridge. In Gene Roddenberry’s vision of the future, books had all but disappeared. In an episode of Enterprise, the last Star Trek series in the franchise, technology is being bartered between the crew and an alien species. The Earth vessel receives upgraded technology and the alien species is allowed to download Earth’s classic literature from the starship’s computer database. The alien captain was quoting lines from some of the great works of fiction before the episode ended. I always worry what would happen if a virus would work its way into a major database in the future and erase the entire collection of the written word of the planet. In the past, the great Alexandrian Library was sacked and most of the scrolls destroyed by a zealous group opposed to the idea of a storehouse of the world’s knowledge. Very few writings actually survived the destruction.

Carl Sagan in the companion volume to his popular PBS series, Cosmos, published by Random House, wrote: “We know of a three-volume history of the world, now lost, by a Babylonian priest named Berossus. The first volume dealt with the interval from the Creation to the Flood, a period he took to be 432,000 years or about a hundred times longer than the Old Testament chronology. I wonder what was in it.”

I wonder, too… It was the first great storehouse of knowledge of the known world, now lost for all time. We need to keep hard copies as backup in the event of a catastrophy. Sometimes even the hard copies get destroyed, not by the hands of man, but by Nature. I remember an antiquarian bookseller in the French Quarter of New Orleans. He had aisles and aisles filled with shelves that contained very rare books. I wonder how many survived the flooding and the wrath of Hurricane Katrina. All those irreplaceable volumes. I still hope there are other copies in old bookstores somewhere in the world.

There is a certain tangible pleasure to be derived from holding a very old book in one’s hands that fingers on a computer keyboard or mouse just can’t duplicate. E. Annie Proulx, in a speech, and quoted in the Points To Ponder column of the May 1996 issue of the Reader’s Digest said: “Books give aesthetic and tactile pleasure, from the dust-jacket art to the binding, paper, typography and text design, from the moment of purchase until the last page is turned. Books speak even when they stand unopened on the shelf. If you would know a man, look at his books, not the software.”

 November 17th marks the anniversary of the patent for the computer mouse…

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 Don Jackson

This entry was posted on Friday, November 16th, 2007 at 6:27 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.