Production + loss = conflict: Information generation and archival

ICT for Peacebuilding, ICTs in general 2 Minutes

A recent post on Mashable reminded me why I started a personal project to archive websites in Sri Lanka during and after the ceasefire agreement (2002 – 2006). To even begin to understand the amount of information we are creating is impossible – there’s just too much of it, and the graphic above is based on best available estimates. The reality is that with petabytes of information locked in the servers of corporations, governments and intelligence services and gigabytes of data production whenever a natural disaster occurs, even for 2011 alone, this is a conservative estimate of information production.

No knowledge here. Just information. And even then, there’s great cause for conflict here. Just the generation of some information will lead to it. Increasingly, the loss of information due to hardware failure, software glitches or malicious erasure will itself lead to conflict, or the exacerbation of existing violence.

My TED talk focussed on this, and in Managing the catastrophic loss of information and knowledge, written way back in 2008, poses questions over the information we will produce and lose that are even more pertinent today. Disturbingly, re-reading them, I find that several years after I penned them, we are no closer to any solution to capture this information for posterity, make sense of it and filter it.

Interestingly, EMC – the same outfit that I anchored my 2008 blog post to – is the one that estimates 1.8 zettabytes of information will be produced over the course of this year. Yet in 2008 it noted,

“the amount of information created, captured, or replicated exceeded available storage for the first time in 2007. Not all information created and transmitted gets stored, but by 2011, almost half of the digital universe will not have a permanent home”.

I wonder if the company’s metrics measured whether what they prophesied has actually come true? What kind of world are we living in, when we don’t even know how much information we’ve lost, much less produced? And amongst a myriad of other questions, are we better humans now that we produce this quantum of information than say a century ago?

The full EMC report for 2011 is worth reading, and also embedded below. Other related posts include,

Published by Sanjana

An Ashoka, Rotary World Peace and TED Fellow, I have since 2002 used, studied and advocated Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) to strengthen peace, human rights & democratic governance. I founded in 2006 and till June 2020 edited the award-winning Groundviews, Sri Lanka's first civic media website. From 2002-2020 I was a Senior Researcher at the Centre for Policy Alternatives. I pioneered both the use of social media for activism and online citizen journalism/civic media in Sri Lanka, including setting up South Asia's first Twitter and Facebook accounts for civic media, in 2007. Having started digital security training for human rights activists in 2010, I continue to advise civil society on digital hygiene, mass and personal surveillance, privacy and secure communications to date. I also curate a comprehensive digital archive of material linked to peace and conflict in Sri Lanka, since 2002. I specialise in, advise and train on social media communications strategy, countering-violence extremism online, web-based activism, online advocacy and grounded, context-based, platform-specific social media research. My work experience over two-decades spans five continents. Through the ICT4Peace Foundation and since 2006, I help strengthen information management during crises and work on countering violent extremism online. For over a decade, this included leading the Foundation's work on these lines with the United Nations and other multi-lateral organisations involved in peacebuilding, peacekeeping, and humanitarian affairs. Since 2008, I have worked in South Asia, South East Asia, North Africa, Europe and the Balkans to capture, disseminate and archive inconvenient truths in austere, violent contexts. I completed doctoral studies at the University of Otago, New Zealand, looking at the symbiotic relationship between offline unrest and online instigation of hate and harm in Sri Lanka and, in the aftermath of the Christchurch massacre in 2019, facilitated by leading research based on New Zealand's first ever Data for Good grant by Twitter.

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