It’s well known that human beings aren’t that great at understanding big numbers. The computer technicians, mathematicians, and scientists who have an intuitive understanding of how numbers work are a breed apart. The rest of us fail to buy insurance and instead spend our money on lottery tickets, with a child’s understanding of probability, risk, and how numbers work.

As the parent of a four year old it’s fascinating to watch him try to get his head around big numbers. He’s pretty solid on the stately procession of one, two, three and four, and can rattle off one to ten with varying degrees of success. I note he has a sentimental affection for the number three, perhaps because for a third of his life it’s been the number he’s required to say when asked his age. However, once he leaves the familiar waters of one-to-ten, it all gets a bit abstract. He will reach for the biggest number he can imagine and come up with, perhaps, thirteen. Beyond ten, there be dragons.

I don’t think most educated adults are all that different. Watching David Cameron stick it to Gordon Brown at Prime Minister’s Questions over the current data scandal, you sensed a primitive, animal fear of big numbers. How could the Government, his outraged tones seemed to simply, LOSE 25 MILLION OF ANYTHING?

There is a sort of a terror about facing the reality of digital compression. How can two shiny CDs contain the pertinent financial data, the mother lode of our digital identities, in such abundant profusion? I think of this as digital vertigo, the confusing sense of falling into the abyss you get when contemplating the limitless worlds that digital culture contains. I pick up my iPod and it contains enough music to play continuously for two entire weeks. Amazon’s new electronic book, the oddly named Kindle, is no bigger than a paperback and has enough storage for two hundred books. My little Archos video player contains more films than I will be able to watch this month.

To give yourself real digital vertigo, however, all you need is an internet connection. It’s extraordinary how often our response to being entirely overwhelmed is to try to contain all that multiplicity within a simple, familiar frame. There are still people who are very happy being customers of AOL (AOL!), precisely because it provides a comfortable, limited experience. And the internet itself has effectively got a home page (a home page! In 2007!), run, of course by Google. These strategies tame our horror at the unbelievable vastness of digital space with a nice, simple uncluttered page, as familiar as the frontispiece to Dickens novel.

You see this instinct for the preservation of the familiar in virtual spaces at its most poignant when you dive into a virtual world. In the three-dimensional space of a world like Second Life, you can build anything, anywhere. You can make your house inside a bumble bee. You can defy gravity, and build at any height and, if you spend enough money, at any scale. Yet by and large people don’t: they build on the land, and reconstruct quaint cottages, or suburban tract homes, or high-rise buildings, creating roofs in a world with no rain, laying foundations in a world without gravity.

The cat’s out the bag, the genie’s out of the bottle, and there’s no going back, bar some Taliban-like repression, some Khmer Rouge horror that returns us from the binary years of nought and one to an analogue Year Zero. People in the developed and affluent world live digital lives. Yet given that most people can’t do basic multiplication or long division even with pen and paper, and that like my son, numbers bigger than the ones we can visualise on our ten fingers contain a kind of abstract mystery, it seems to me that we’re always going to struggle with being analogue creatures in digital worlds.

As for that data scandal, I feel sorry for Rymans. What’s the point in buying a paper shredder to destroy your banking records if some civil servant ensures that your details end up being sold in a pub to some Russian data criminal? Hold on firmly to the moving handrail and expect more digital vertigo.

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Michael Parsons, now editor of CNET.co.uk, spent five years working in Silicon Valley and worrying about technology. He can be reached at michael.parsons@cnet.com

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