Peter Cochrane's Hard Drive 1996
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A Uni Heap on the Beach
Somewhere in your deepest memory is probably a scene at the seaside with parents and family when you were 10 or so years old. If you think about that day it will be recalled in reasonably vivid detail you might consider to be fact. But should you have a photograph from the day, the difference between reality and recollection will be very significant. Why is this? Well, we are more analogue than digital and our memory process is Hebbian. That is, reinforcement followed by exponential decay with time. So unless we regularly refresh our memory, events and remembrances start to part company.

In stark contrast, machines are dominantly digital and therefore record everything with precision and longevity. Couple this with the human tendency to record everything and throw nothing away and we are faced with mountains of worthless data. We are often data rich and information poor. In the paper world of the past many of us instituted regimes of yearly culls of filing cabinets. Files would be taken out and reduced to a 10th of their thickness by mercilessly dispatching huge amounts of paper to the shredding machine. That regime has now been reborn in the cyclic culling of information on PCs and mainframes. But it has got much worse. Multiple copies and versions on multiple machines in multiple locations. How do we cope? Well, I don?t think we can. Trying to operate two PCs in two locations, and keep them in synchronism, seems impossible. Add a lap-top, and the level of difficulty seems to accelerate away from us. So what to do?

Although machines are digital, it is not beyond us to introduce Hebbian mechanics to exponentially cull information triggered by its lack of usage. In many organisations information now has a half life of 6 months or less. And yet we still record and store it as if it was of value, which it is not. As a first step in this direction software can check on the last access date of information, and after a predetermined time, remove all colour, logos and non-essential information. Later, automatic summarising can cut documents down to their very essence. Progressively doing this sees documents in a fit state to be destroyed, or merely left as a headstone in some remote and little used memory space.

Such systems are not difficult to engineer and do work, but I have to confess to also destroying vast amounts of information and never filing it in the first place. People often seem to confuse communication, quality and quantity, and certainly when dealing with some institutions it is often better to bin rather than even attempting to read and file.

In another corner of my life I have experimented with a novel way of filing. This I call uniheap! Because I come from a world of paper I have been conditioned to putting electronic information in folders and neatly storing it on my hard disc. Indeed this is a very useful and powerful mechanism for creating order, stability and efficiency. However, in the world of E-mail that comes thick and fast there is no time to file, no time to sort, and merely throwing all the messages into a big pile seems sufficient. The search and find capability of a PC brings to the fore all messages on any topic or from any group or person almost instantly and then it can just be thrown back on the heap. I suspect my mind works like this too! If only I could get it to cull all the irrelevant and never used items - I might have enough capacity for the rest of my life.

Peter Cochrane holds the Collier Chair for the Public Understanding of Science & Technology at the University of Bristol. His home page is:
http://cochrane.org.uk