The Special Report

26th September 1999

Information explodes

By Dr.Susantha Goonatilake

In the 1st century BC at Aluvihare in Matale a unique event occurred in the history of Buddhist literature. Buddhist texts which had been hitherto handed down orally were written down.

Transcribed books were the medium of transmission of information as written culture spread throughout the world. This book culture took a leap with printed books - again Buddhist texts - that first emerged in the 8th century, if not earlier, in East Asia. Another jump was the use of movable type in Germany during the European Renaissance. By the sixteenth century, printed books were being distributed all over Europe.

One of those Renaissance texts that went to seventeen printings was by the Englishman, Recorde. This text on new arithmetic was one of similar books in Latin, German, French and Italian that became popular revolutionizing Europe's commerce and computation.

This new arithmetic was, however, old South Asian knowledge known before the dawn of Christianity and later transmitted by Arabs to Europe. The European capacity for arithmetic before this, was very limited. For example, the largest number the Greeks could name was the Myriad - ten thousand. Around the same time, Buddhist texts in Sri Lanka dealt with very large numbers - for example 1053 - a number infinitely larger than the Myriad.

The advent of printing and the spread of the new arithmetic illustrate two key changes in the storage and processing of knowledge.

From the seventeenth century, knowledge exploded. Scientific knowledge today doubles every ten years or so, faster than the growth of the population. Non scientific knowledge of the last 25 years is greater than that of all previous knowledge.

A daily edition of the New York Times carries more information than the average person in 17th century Europe was exposed to in his entire life. The output from such contemporary science projects like the Hubble Telescope and the Human Genome Project is so large that it is beyond unaided human handling.

Dealing with this information explosion has led to an inexorable computerization of the world. This, combined with the telephone enables the instantaneous transportation of information. This informatization will make all other previous technological revolutions pale in comparison. Many human activities, if not virtually all, will be influenced. In ten to fifteen years time, these effects will transform us more than any other political or social event in recent history. Let me elaborate.

CD ROMS store information very much cheaper than any printed paper. With the Internet - a global collection of interconnected computers - access to information across the world is instantaneous and laughably cheap. The Internet is still an infant, but growing explosively. Already several libraries are on-line, their contents available at an instant.

Most of the newspapers of the world including the Sri Lankan ones are now on the Internet. As well as increasingly, their past issues. With a click, the world's news anywhere or almost anywhere is made available. 'Push' technologies feed one only the areas of one's interest.

In the free such service I subscribe, I chose world news in general, with sections on Asia and on science and technology. As it is a Western service, it does not cover all my needs in detail but keeps me adequately informed. When I require detailed Asian or Sri Lankan news I go to regional newspapers and sites.

Buddhist texts which once gave the lead in recording have also taken the information technology plunge. The Thais, the lndians and our own Venerable Professor Bhikku Dhammavihari have helped computerize the main Pali texts. Some are available on CD ROM, many on the Internet. The Americans computerized the Tibetan texts, Taiwanese, the Chinese. As churches in Europe empty, this information help fill a vacuum.

These massive possibilities hold major changes for Sri Lanka. An educated, competitive population would have been the natural spring board for wide use of information as raw material and resource. But for a variety of reasons, this has not happened. But unplanned, this is changing.

Twenty years ago there were about a thousand computers in Sri Lanka. The figure now is in the tens of thousands at sites with almost certain access to telephones - and so potentially the Internet. Computer classes abound in every town.

At costs lower than private tuition, smart parents are giving their children Internet access. Already a few Sri Lankan temples have connected to the Internet. Most of our newspapers are composed on computers.

But compared to India the fare they serve, specially in our English language media, is low. There is also an English-Sinhala /Tamil divide paralleled by what is exported and imported as information and misinformation from the country. Key gate keepers - often semi educated - slant this export-import business as well as the English-Sinhala/Tamil divide.

A simple examination of the Internet will show this. Till a few years ago, it was filled with Eelam propaganda and the slanted material thrown up by local foreign funded NGOs or the Church. Now there is some counter to these mistruths, for example SPUR in Australia.

A couple of years ago computers of Sri Lankan embassies were subject to a hacker attack by Tigers, allegedly the first organized cyber terrorism in the world.

On hindsight, the intrusion is seen as unsophisticated and crude. It reflected more the unsophistication of our foreign ministry than the prowess of the Tigers.

An interesting aside was that a 15-year-old-Sri Lankan seeing Tiger falsehoods did a cyber attack of his own erasing the offensive material. A counter attack by the Tigers disabled his hard disk. But wiser, he now does his defence elsewhere.

This example illustrates some home truths of the new information age. The key value of information, its easy transportability at virtually no cost and the vulnerability of outdated structures.

The centralized decision making system in the Soviet Union collapsed because it could not deliver. (Decades before, researchers had shown the inefficiency of centralized systems to handle change.)

As we enter the new age, there are similar gross anachronisms. Such dinosaurs will soon be swept away.

The writer has over the last five years participated in several of the key global discussions on the future. His academic articles have appeared in leading journals on the topic such as Futures Research Quarterly, Futures, and Futures Bulletin..

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