Sunday, December 20, 2009
Mystery Books as Portrait of Technological Development
During the blizzard, I finished listening to the current bestseller The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. My previous mystery was Blood Work by Michael Connelly, published in 1998. In Blood, one character has a car phone, but the detective is continually looking for pay phones and leaving messages on answering machines. A reporter can search The Los Angeles Times archives, and the author explains carefully how this could be because he can't presume the reader is familiar with computer searches. Photo enhancement is possible. Fast forward ten years to Dragon, whose plot hinges on hackers who anonymously download the content of peoples' hard discs and take control of their computers. The detective himself can manipulate pictures with Photoshop. Could this decade have been the fastest change in our personal control (or lack of it) over our information sources ever?
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Since the invention of the integrated circuit followed by Intel's invention and exploitation of Moore's Law for microprocessors, the capacity for information handling has been accelerating as inventive minds find ever more ways to exploit the miniaturization of micro-electronics. That race will not decelerate until the cost of information handling stops declining. The past decade has been the fastest because it is farthest along the acceleration curve. What remains to be seen is when the information trees stop growing toward the sky and new forms of information handling appear. There are barriers against endless acceleration such as the breakdown of electronics as components shrink into molecular scale dimensions. There is also the problem of storing all the information in ever improving media that nonetheless consume vast amounts of electric power.
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