Information Overload

The School of Information Management and Systems (UC-Berkeley) presented an interesting study about the amount of information stored in the world. Note that one terabyte is a thousand Gb, one petabyte is a thousand terabytes and one exabyte is a thousand petabytes, or a billion Gb, or 10^18 bytes. The world produces between one and two exabytes of unique information per year, and printed documents of all kinds comprise only .003% of the total.

Stats point that storage media are something like this (average numbers): paper, which includes books, newspapers, periodicals and office documents, more or less 130 Tb; film, which includes photographs, cinema and x-rays, more or less 250 Tb; optical, which includes music CDs, data CDs and DVDs, more or less 60 Tb; magnetic, which includes camcord tapes, PC disk drives, departmental servers and enterprise servers, more or less 1,100 Tb.

The authors note the "paucity of print", where printed material of all kinds makes up less than .003% of the total storage of information. And the numbers for the growth rate of each medium tell us that "newspapers" is the only item whose presence is shrinking (-2%). They also tell us that an interesting finding is the "dominance of digital" information, the largest in total and the most rapidly growing. "While unique content on print and film are hardly growing at all, optical and digital magnetic storage shipments are doubling each year. Even today, most textual information is ´born digital´, and within a few years will be true for images as well".

Although the authors state that the numbers presented are rough estimates, and that they had to make various assumptions in order to construct the figures, the important thing is that they point to a clear trend, which is the magnetic content. They also calculate that the world´s total production of information amounts to about 250 Mb for each man, woman and child on earth, and say that it is clear that we are all drowning in a sea of information. They state that the challenge is to learn to swim in that sea, rather than drown in it. Even knowing that these stats are from 2000, we can have a good view of the situation.

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