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Design

Weighing Up The Internet And Our Digital Future

Preparing ourselves for an augmented world.

Pondering how much the vast virtual world of data and information we’ve created weighs, in grams, is an interesting quandary. For one, it shows us just how much the nascent digital world is beginning to have a tangible presence in the physical world, to make its mark on our collective unconscious. Just last week the following question was posed by a reader of The New York Times: “When an e-reader is loaded with thousands of books, does it gain any weight?”. Professor John D. Kubiatowicz from the University of California basically answered yes, it gains about an atogram (10^–18 grams) of weight. Apparently, the trapped electrons in the flash memory have a higher energy, and therefore a higher density.

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And, following that revelation, the above video also emerged last week where Vsauce attempts to find out how much the internet weighs—and by the “internet” he means the energy contained in the information: every email, videos, picture, blog post ever created—what’s their collective stored weight? It comes to about 0.2 millionths of an ounce. So that’s 5 million terabytes of information (which is all the info on the internet according to Eric Schmidt) weighing the same as the smallest grain of sand.

Map of the internet circa 2005, from The Opte Project

These kind of exercises, while theoretical, are interesting looked at in the context of what some futurists and technologists are exploring with regards to the virtual world invading physical space. They envision futures where we might, for instance, have an augmented ubicomp environment where virtual objects move in space, an idea explored in Greg Tran’s Mediating Mediums: The Digital 3d.

The virtual world, while different, is no less immaterial but is just another kind of material, it’s a place that is an extension of our mental rather than physical selves—and when that world starts to come out from our screens and into our environments and merge with our physical lives this data, this digital material, will have a physical presence, a weight, just like the internet itself (which it’ll be an extension of) does. Even if its collective existence can only really be measured in theoretical measurements for the time being because they’re just so damn small. At least, until we invent a scale that supports atograms.

Keiichi Matsuda’s Augmented (hyper)Reality: Domestic Robocop

If we’re to believe some of the technologists and futurists of our time, the future is going to look like a place where technology will become ever more invisible but much more immersive—so perhaps these musings on how much cyberspace and virtual data weigh is a collective burgeoning of greater awareness, readying ourselves for the digital 3D epoch. An attempt at a wider understanding of the virtual world, so that when it comes spilling out of our monitors and makes a big virtual stain on Euclidean space, the ghost-like forms that replace the physical won’t be so shocking to us—instead of the shock, it’ll be the “meh” of the new. Because it has weight, however small, it can be equated to tangibility (added to the fact that we can see it), so we can deal with it. If it’s just a hallucination writ real, we’re going to be totally freaked out.

So, when and if it does eventually happen on a mass scale, while it would irretrievably change our experience of the world, we won’t be fleeing from it in terror like the audience of the Lumières’ L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat, instead it’ll be about as reactionary as the latest iOS update (excluding iOS 5).