Friday, May 6, 2011

Data Limiting and Circumvention: A PostHuman Tale

A few years ago, there was a report published on an American publication which showed that on the average a person consumes about 34 gigabytes of information daily. This amount of information comes from various sources; TV, radio, books etc.

Based on this report, I began writing a story on what would happen if the government began limiting the data consumption of each person. What if there were implants embedded into the brains of every citizens so that when the limit is reached, the person will no longer be able to receive any more data?

In my story, this data censorship will lead to the evolution of human perception. To maximize and/or continue data reception, people will resort to various tactic. People may begin specializing in only a few senses and block all the others. People may try to filter unnecessary information input such as static, noise neglible pixels etc. People may train to just absorb fragments of the data but optimize their mind so that they can reform the fragment to its full form. Etc.

You can read the entire story here.

Excerpt:


With this new lifestyle, the citizens have minimized their dependence to information. Newspapers became adjunct and replaced with leaflets containing thoroughly condensed daily news. Television shows were revamped completely. They would now only include 1 to 2 minute shows in their programming. Likewise, the music industry was rebuilt from scratch and embraced the MIDI technology wholeheartedly as the main medium for the songs.

This is just the first part of a big story that I'm not sure would be finished.

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