Anonymous Patron writes, from The Age,
“It has become a cliche to talk of information overload, or the information revolution, or the information millennium. But these terms are cliches precisely because they are true.
Consider some facts: More than five exabytes of information was produced last year, a figure growing by 30 per cent a year, which means the total amount of stored information roughly doubles every three years. More than 90 per cent of it is stored on magnetic media, primarily hard disk. Most of the rest is stored on film, with minuscule amounts stored on paper or optical media."
Update: 02/24 15:26 EST by B:Alternate Link
Information Overload
I could not get the link to the story to work so I am making these comments without the advantage of reading the article.
When I have read previous articles that discussed similar items there is something I noticed. When the articles talked about terrabytes or exobytes of digital information they were counting anything. Every business that was storing stuff on a computer had “information.”
The summary of the article seemed to imply that very little information is in the paper format anymore. Much of what is stored on computers is “data” and what is stored on paper is “knowlege”. This is not to argue that you cannot store knowledge on a computer. I just am not impressed with exobytes of “data” stored on a computer. Just because there are terabytes of “data” being stored does not mean that everyone is suffering from information overload.