Tonight I watched The Boys From Brazil, one of those classic films more famous for it's surprise ending (which everyone knows by now) than for being truly great. Once I accepted that is was hokey, though, I really enjoyed the twisty plot. However, there was one element that I didn't understand. There is a bone bracelet that appears throughout the film, and also in the closing shot, and I wondered "what the heck is this damned bone bracelet?" So I did what anyone would do. I googled it.

Soon I found myself on a message board on Internet Movie Database (the venerable IMDB to its fans). There were a few answers to my question on the message board, none of which seemed particularly plausible. But by then I had lost interested in the bracelet. I was fascinated by IMDB.

I started poking around IMDB and started looking at the trivia pages. The amount of detail there astounded me. For example, in Steven Spielberg's film Munich, someone figured out that the Tel Aviv scenes were actually shot in Malta by looking at the telephone booths in the background and the direction of the sunlight. In all, there are more than 30 such "goofs" from Spielberg's Oscar-nominated film that are now a matter of public record.

The direction of sun proves they're not at the beach in Tel Aviv. (It's Malta.)

First I thought, it's amazing that someone could figure out the film's location by analyzing the direction of the suns rays and looking at the design of distant phone booths. And then I thought, no it's not really that amazing, it's probably some Maltese guy who walks where the scene was shot every day and recognized it as soon as he saw the film. No, that is amazing is that this strange fact noticed by some guy in Malta is now public knowledge. The internet makes the information accessible to millions. Spectacular search engines like Google locate minute knowledge with amazing precision.

It's not really news that internet + search = all human knowledge at your fingertips. That's what Wikipedia is about, after all. What is amazing is the type of information that is available. What type? Every type. Thousands and millions of tiny pieces of information: when and where a Helen bought her beloved dog (on the breeeder's website), the book chosen by the Junior League book club in Cincinnati in March of 2004 (in an Amazon reader review posted by a club member), how many days Tommy missed school because of chickenpox last week (his mom recorded it on her blog).

This is information that would never have been recorded publically before. It would not have found its way into a newspaper, radio program, or book. It would have been known, yes, by the breeder, and the book club, and Tommy (and his Mom), but no one else. Now every detail that people choose to record publically, they can.

The minutiae of human knowledge is being recorded and publicized on an unprecidented scale . What are the results? Well, it will be harder to keep a secret. (Thought know one would ever know about those Maltese phone booths in your Israeli film, Steven? Well, now they do.) Politicians should be afraid, very afraid.

Our understanding of social history will change too. The documentation available to historians studying the society of the early twenty-first century will be so overwhelming, it will be taken for granted that even historical account will be incomplete. (You might try to study the handful of journals kept by farmwives in Iowa in the 1950's. Try studying the thousands of e-mails sent every day by housewives in Iowa in 2005).

However, I think the cumulative result of all information being public (once we've worked out the privacy issues) is a continued collapsing of the social hierarchy. In the past, what was recorded publically was what was important. The every motion and word of presidents and kings were recorded and disseminated daily on news reports. Their words and actions are still recorded, but so are those of ordinary people. Just look at Twitter. And blogs. Maybe the increased "volume" of the lives of ordinary people will lead to a realization that there is not so great a difference between kings and presidents and ordinary people (that, in fact, there is no such thing as "ordinary people"). And the implications of this perception of equality between leaders and their subjects could be very interesting indeed.