Until recently, I didn’t know a gigabyte from a mosquito bite, but I did know that one drains my blood and the other drains my wallet.
When my computer said I had used 99 percent of my storage or 14.86 gigabytes of the “15 GB” provided by my system for files, I thought I’d better find out what a gigabyte is.
A gigabyte is a billion bytes.
McDonalds has sold 99 billion hamburgers, for instance, and the astronomer Neil De Grasse Tyson says that if stacked one on top of the other that is enough burgers “to reach the moon and back”.
He notes as an aside that it is also “terrible news for cows.”
But it gives me a visual idea of a billion, or in this case 99 billion.
A tech friend told me that my email was definitely the culprit eating up my 14.86 gigabytes and I would have to delete them.
It took three tries before the computer could clump all 55,410 of the inbox and sent box emails together and delete them.
Where did they go? I have no idea. Will they pour down from the cloud now as digital acid rain?
My hunch is that Google is selling them to somebody, although both Google and Facebook claim that they do not “sell” their data, they “share” it for free with entities who then buy ads that target Facebook and Google users.
What’s the difference if the money goes into the cash cow as “sharing” or “selling?” Either way the cow gets fatter and delivers green milk.
It was amusing to watch Facebook’s creator, 33-year-old Mark Zuckerberg, testify last year before Congress. He had donned a Wall Street uniform, a sedate suit instead of the Joe College uniform he usually wears, a T-shirt and hoodie.
You can’t really be an ordinary Joe when you are worth $60 billion, even if you do wear a hoodie and started your Facebook empire in a Harvard dorm room as a dating service for hormonal undergraduates.
It turns out if you do the math, that my 55,410 emails amount to a mere 12.6 emails a day.
Just imagine the digital chains accumulated by America’s teenagers, who have switched from emails to text messages and now send between 90 and 100 texts a day.
“Appalling!” some might say.
As an English teacher who taught teenagers for 25 years in Vermont schools, I have a different take. Anything that encourages reading and writing is good, even text messages.
You can’t read if you don’t eye a few words now and then, and you can’t write if you don’t scribble something occasionally. You have to begin somewhere. I began with comic books and graduated to the Hardy Boys mysteries.
So text messaging and emailing in my opinion are actually stretching the cerebral reading and writing muscles of our children.
That may have been the hidden agenda of Dartmouth College’s late president John G. Kemeny when he and a colleague invented the first digital language in 1964 called Basic, setting in motion the birth of digital empires now called Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Google and Amazon.
Facebook by the way has 2.27 billion “monthly active users.”
Thus Facebook is very close to catching up with the world’s largest religion, Christianity, which has 2.3 billion active users or as they used to call them “members.”
But there’s one caveat. Facebook is run by that 33-year-old guy in the hoodie and T-shirt or Wall Street suit, depending on his audience’s costume needs.
No one, not a pope nor a president, nor a Nobel prize winner, nor the inventor of Basic, should have the kind of power to govern such a gazillion gigabyte universe involving 2.27 billion “monthly active users” without some kind of oversight.
Even the pope had a Martin Luther.
In 1519, Christianity was split in two after a pope tried to scam the public by, in effect, selling tickets to heaven, called “indulgences,” and a Catholic monk, Martin Luther, challenged him , inadvertently spawning the Protestant Reformation.
Is there a Martin Luther waiting for Facebook’s 33-year-old pope?
Listen to the words of Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) when he questioned Zuckerberg before Congress :
“Mr. Zuckerberg, would you be comfortable sharing with us the name of the hotel you stayed in last night?”
Zuckerberg: “Um. No.”
Durbin: “If you messaged anyone this week would you be comfortable sharing their names with us?”
Zuckerberg: “I would not feel comfortable doing that, senator.”
Durbin: “I think that might be what this is all about.”
Facebook and its “services” seek and record exactly where we are located thanks to global positioning satellites, every time we click on one of their accounts, perhaps hundreds of times a day. Google does the same with Gmail.
When I deleted my 55,410 emails, I got an automatic digital message from Gmail. “Your account is empty. We miss you.”
I’ll bet they do.
Paul Keane lives in Hartford.