- "...800 megabytes of data - roughly equivalent to
800 books - was created for every man, woman and child in 2002."
-
- Academics in California have confirmed what every office
worker in the land has known for years: we are drowning in a rising sea
of information.
-
- Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley,
say the amount of information being generated worldwide has increased by
30% each year since 1999, and that the amount being stored has doubled
in that time.
-
- That means 800 megabytes of data - roughly equivalent
to 800 books - was created for every man, woman and child in 2002.
-
- The research team studied information stored on paper,
film, and optical and magnetic media, and measured the vast flows of information
across the internet. They found the new information, stored on everything
from hard disk drives to paper, added up to 5m terabytes - or 5 million
million MB - last year alone.
-
- Attempting to make that figure a little more imaginable,
the team estimated this adds up to the contents of half a million new Libraries
of Congress.
-
- These libraries, however, would not hold many masterpieces
in their electronic soup. Much of the information came not from books and
journals, but from the more mundane: office documents and mail.
-
- Peter Lyman, one of the leaders of the research team,
said the surge in information was due to a new-found desire to document
all that happens around us. "All of a sudden, almost every aspect
of life around the world is being recorded and stored in some information
format," he said.
-
- But last night David Lewis, a psychologist who works
with big business to tackle stress and information-overload problems, said:
"I certainly think there's a data overload - and an awful lot of the
data that is generated is entirely redundant. Information is something
which is valuable, which you can use. Data is just junk."
-
- Dr Lewis said today's infonauts would need to learn new
ways to sift through information by developing reading skills to rapidly
extract useful information. "Have a reading purpose in mind when you
go to any piece of information," he advised. "If there is no
purpose, and you're not reading for pleasure, then just don't bother."
-
- And William Dutton, director of the Oxford Internet Institute,
also warned the numbers used in the report could be a little misleading.
"Clearly the report puts some numbers on an essentially valid trend,"
he said. "But it lacks some base validity by measuring it in bits
- the complete works of Shakespeare is less than three high-resolution
photographs."
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- Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited
2003
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- http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,1075449,00.html
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