I just read a Fast Company article called “How Apple Will Draft Everyone Into the Cloud. Or Else” and I’m smiling as I wonder how Icloud and Steve Jobs will now affect my Apple stock.
Oh, sure, Google and Amazon and others are storing music and all kinds of files on “cloudy servers somewhere up there” but Apple promises so much more and so much faster and so much more intuitively…but haven’t they always? They promise that "all my stuff” will be where I want it—instantly on any of my Apple devices. When Jobs introduced it earlier this week, he admitted that he had to rewrite their synching devices “from the ground up.” But isn’t that always how clouds are formed? From water rising from the earth?
When I was an undergraduate at U. Wis. Eau Claire I studiously avoided taking math classes by enrolling in Zoology for Pre Med Majors (a stretch!) and Geography (a breeze!). One assignment for that class I remember was the "difficult" task of checking a campus outdoor thermometer every day for a semester in order to determine that indeed daily temperatures do peak at 4 p.m. The other thing I learned was how to identify clouds and memorize their Latinate names. Of course our four year old grandaughter could now do this in about two minutes with the help of Google. Nimbus, cirrus, cirrocumulus, cirrostratus…
Hoping to learn something new about knowledge and wisdom, I turned this past week to The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood by James Gleick (who also inspired me with his Chaos). Gleick ends his tome by reminding us that we’re all patrons of the Library of Babel now…and we’re all librarians. Still we keep wondering what it is we know because in cyberspace everything lies in shadows. Cloudy shadows. Jobs and others are just trying to help solve (or exacerbate, I don’t know which) our information overload fatigue.
Information anxiety can co-exist with boredom—an ironic twist. If you're like me, you feel as if you're drowning in this “Total Noise” as David Foster Wallace put it in 2007. “A tsunami of available fact, context and perspective.” Our main strategy for coping, Gleick advises, is filter and search. But who will search and who will filter? Bloggers wonder: are their too many mouths or too many ears? Clouds of data/information/knowledge and dare we hope, wisdom, “loom over us,” Gleick says, “not quite visible, not quite tangible, but awfully real. [I place emphasis on “awfully.”]…amorphous, spectral, hovering nearby, yet not situated in any one place. Heaven must once have felt this way to the faithful. People talk about shifting their lives to the cloud—their informational lives at least…All traditional ideas of privacy, based on doors and locks, physical remoteness and invisibility, are upended in the cloud.” (p. 396)
If not an analogy to heaven, surely one to “noosphere” as my favorite Jesuit philospher, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, explained it. “Does it not seem as though a great body is in the process of being born…its interdependence with and responsibility for a whole in evolution?”
It hurts my head to think about all this, so I’ll just lie on the lawn and watch cloud pictures forming and morphing across a brilliant blue Vermont sky and trust to all the rest.








Recent Comments