Endangered resources: March 24, 1997 issue of New Thinking

March 24, 1997 New Thinking:
Endangered resources

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March 24, 1997

Endangered resources

By Gerry McGovern

Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was plenty on this earth. We humans looked out onto resources that seemed to go on forever. Great was our joy and great was our hunger to use these resources.

We chopped down forests, we dug into mines, we fished and we fumed. In time we discovered that our ‘limitless’ resources had limits. We wised up, conserved more.

Once upon a time and a very good time it is, we look out onto the Internet and see much that we feel is cheap and essentially limitless. Cheap hard disk space allows us to place vast quantities of information online. Email allows us to communicate around the world for the price of a local call. Digital units we can copy and paste. Digital space goes on and on.

What did our physical resources do for us? The coal kept us warm. The wood housed us. The steel gave us better tools. The oil helped us run our factories and move us through our physical spaces at greater speeds. We used our physical resources to make life better and easier for ourselves.

What do our digital resources do for us? They help us automate repetitive tasks. They help us solve problems more quickly and solve other problems which heretofore were difficult or impossible for us to solve.

They open greater communication possibilities for us. They allow us to locate, manipulate and distribute vast quantities of information. They allow us to move through cyberspace in a flash. Their objective is to make life better and easier for us.

Too much of anything is a bad thing. The very fact that the digital world is an essentially limitless place endangers the resources it offers. Waste not want not has lost nearly all meaning. We copy files with the ease of copying. We save without thinking. We create because it is so easy to create.

The physical world is a limited place. But in one way that is an advantage. A coal seam stayed a coal seam, in the place it was until it was found and mined. An information seam, on the other hand, has no fixed and solid place to reside. Over it can be poured and poured reams and reams of low level data until the information seam goes down so deep that it is essentially unreachable; a wasted resource.

In an environment that has a limited space then, it is the management of the resources within that environment which is important. In an environment that has an essentially limitless space, it is the management of the growth of that space which is important.

With physical resources we quite rightly need to conserve their use, otherwise we will reach depletion. With digital resources we need to conserve their creation, otherwise it will lead to proliferation.

We have grown up with the worry that we live in a world whose endangered resources are liable to run out. In cyberspace we have the opposite worry: that our information resources will run riot, growing at such a pace that they choke our capacity to find, understand and use them.

In cyberspace, we therefore need to conserve not the use of our resources but rather their creation.

By Gerry McGovern

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In cyberspace, we need to conserve not the use of our resources but rather their creation.