Existence in Abstraction

The digital world is an interesting phenomenon. The process of converting to a paperless office has brought this to full conscious awareness. I am notoriously bad at organizing and tracking paperwork, mostly due to the volume of things to track. We are increasingly in need of aids to manage the data that comes through our mail slot.

I want to emphasize: The amount of physical data we receive often exceeds our cognitive abilities to track and organize it.

I have mountains of paper, receipts, rental statements, insurance invoices and payments for both car and home, taxes, property taxes, financial aid documents for my graduate program, software serial numbers, and the list goes on. It is quite impossible for me to memorize any of this information in a way that is useful, and even file folder organization does not provide a way to organize the information to make finding any one document a simple matter. A conversion to digital records provides a layer of abstraction that creates a useful way of managing the data.

Digital conversion abstracts my documents into searchable text that can be indexed, searched, and retrieved in an almost limitless number of ways. A database has no need to have a memory, it can simply query vast numbers of records at a speed which to human perception is instantaneous. However, this data is fragile. My vital records are reduced to magnetically stored 1’s and 0’s. These are not any less fragile than the physical documents, but there is the implication that redundant co-location of this data is necessary so that the information is not lost. Such a loss would be near devastating if physical records are destroyed. Previously, if paperwork had become lost, there was some chance of finding it had been misplaced. Disruption of digital data can mean real total loss of that documentation.

Now examine other parts of life and the many layers of abstraction. I have a bank account. There is money in that account, but if I were to ask to see the physical currency backing the amounts in my accounts I would simply be greeted by a number on a screen that was generated from a database. The majority of that money has come from checks from my property management company, I have records of these checks but the currency they represent is also existent entirely as points in a database. One misplaced decimal and I can grow by orders of magnitude or have my financial ability crushed. We are assured that there are rigorous safeguards and audits of data to insure that mistakes do not occur. In the majority of cases these safeguards and trails of digital records work brilliantly, but errors do occur. Even one error in a million is a high rate when you consider the billions of transactions that occur daily.

We must begin to ask what the reality of our work, income, accounts, and information is based upon. We are physical being who increasingly interact with each other through abstractions in data. To what degree do we know that our digital interactions are with other people? To what extent are we cruel to data in ways that we would never impose on flesh and blood?

This is not an exit.