Will the Future Contain Information Black Holes?

Rushing to the IMAX to see How to Train Your Dragon turned out not to be such a clever idea. Getting good seats in an IMAX is, IMHO, essential, but the cinema was pretty empty so there was no need. Wouldn't it be great, I thought, if there was some (Twitter supported?) service to let me know: no need to rush, plenty of seats. However, it is not clear that the cinema wants you to know this and, by definition, if there are few people there, the chance of the information being volunteered is slight.

So, why we are all thinking of a ubiquitous information future, there are likely to be (many?) situations in which there is no economic or social reason for the presence of that information.

Comments

[Michael Grube]

I disagree that these black holes are likely to exist. Information itself depends completely on the subject(the person or thing to which the information is relative) and people will only demand information that is of interest to them. Because the amount of information that is possible(you can have information about anything you can imagine), humans have to demand certain kinds of information if they want any at all.

Are there databases full of useless information? Sure, but the possibility always lingers that even that information could be useful someday.
I'm not sure I'm worried about information black holes.

[karlcow]

knowing that the cinema is empty might attract people who wants to have empty rooms. The business case is possible too.

About being ubiquitous, there are two types of things. Accessible data on things, accessible data on people, I love the first one, I'm very worried about the second one.

I like GPS, because it is a (low quality) broadcast location grid system. It doesn't locate you, you locate yourself on a grid.

On the opposite, cellphone towers location systems are tied to an id (mobile phone contracts), it identifies your location. Very bad.

I wish cellphone towers where only creating a grid of geolocation.

[Steve Wilhelm]

For example, I heard on NPR that BP does not disclose how often oil well shut off valves are in situations in which they should be activated. Nor do they disclose how often the valves succeed and how often they fail.

[Agatheb]

I totally agree and i like the term black hole though it does not describe accurately what's going on.
There's a continuous push for openness and transparency and data is the gateway to that. But there's no 'innocent' dataset, each comes with consequences and interests. Be it for money, reputation, politics, survival, there'll always be data that you or someone else does not want to make available.