Tuesday 10 March 2015

Information age issues

Yesterday morning, an email arrived saying that my verified identity documents had been received by diocese in Europe child protection officer, and that now I could complete the application on-line, through the Churches Agency for Safeguarding website, something of a change from the last time I applied five years ago. Thankfully, the process was simple and user friendly, and ended with a confirmation of reception registration number, allowing the enquiry to be tracked if needs be.

In the morning post was a set of application forms for the Church in Wales CRB check. The older paper process is still used by the Provincial child protection office. I believe the reason for this isn't that the Church is Wales lags behind in technological labour saving devices, but because the automated enquiry cannot be carried out in Welsh - something I noticed when I logged into the CAS website. A bilingual church has its own values and priorities to maintain, and this may require a different way of engaging with a necessary process.

I wrote in my Lenten blog on Sunday on clouds in scripture, and the contrast between the image of the 'cloud of unknowing' reflecting the common experience of how cloud obscures all we think we know, and the marketing image of the internet Cloud as the ultimate receptacle of information and knowledge. Such a remarkable change has occurred since I retired. The user friendliness of interactive services delivered by the internet has improved vastly, shopping, banking, video and audio entertainment, travel booking, tax payment, CRB checks increasingly 'just work'. 

Personal productivity tools which were once a necessity on everyone's PC can now be used freely from the internet, courtesy of Microsoft One Drive or Google Drive and other services providing data storage and apps. All depends upon having an internet connection and a device that can be used for access, and that's a different story to what it was a few years ago, with phones and tablets now as powerful as a desktop machine, albeit, not quite so easy as a proper sized physical keyboard. But, there are still limitations, not least confidence in the continuity of this vast and elaborate electronic construct.

While writing this my internet connection, twice as fast as when I retired, and still the cheapest offer from TalkTalk has temporarily disconnected half a dozen times, and then stalled the router altogether. Using my Chromebook on this occasion resulted in losing the final part of my text. Despite caution in copying and saving before rebooting stalled router and Chromebook, the fully saved text was nowhere to be found, and the internal SSD is certainly not full. It a clever Cloud device, but not that clever. I'm not clever for trusting it, knowing how flaky my connection can be.

Admittedly, much more is required of our channel of communication to the internet now than three years ago. Three computers, two tablets, three smartphones, the phone signal booster, and the YouView internet TV box could occasionally all be running at the same time, and their connected data streams competing to communicate with the world outside the house.

It's not long since we had only a third of that number of devices connected. That's bound to make a difference. However much basic and essential service capacity is improved, however much we benefit from them, it's likely that demand will continue to outstrip supply. If I pay extra for a faster service, what guarantee will there be of improvement, as more devices are made requiring on-line access? Connectivity limitations have consequences for all development. It will remain a political, economic and social issue until the next paradigm shift in global communication occurs.

We're being warned that technological development has bred an obsolescence in hardware and storage media which puts at risk vast amounts of early digital data because it becomes unreadable, either due to deterioration of the media, or the breakdown of irreplaceable equipment used to read it. In addition to this is the long standing issue of file format incompatibility bred by unhealthy business competitiveness between software producers. Universally readable file formats are now becoming more widespread in their acceptance, but this can still be problematic for reading historic data and documents, so there is a double risk of loss.

Written information about life in ancient times exists because of the way records were kept. Although a great deal has undoubtedly been lost over millennia, new investigative material keeps on turning up. Thanks to forensic archaeological techniques more is discovered about our past. Understood better than ever today is how vital good data about anything is. Data retention needs future proofing, so that our generation aren't dubbed the problem ancestors who, despite themselves were careless about how they kept records. Thankfully, there is growing collaboration in the effort to find long term solutions to these problems, and hopefully the historic impulse to competitiveness can be be transformed into a desire to excel for the common good, if not for the glory of God.


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