According to a report by researchers in California, the information created in the world in 2002 can be stored in 9,500,000,000,000 books
Yuval Dror, Haaretz, News and Walla!
A library worker after the earthquake in Sendai, Japan
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The feeling that huge amounts of information flood humanity from all directions recently received scientific reinforcement, when researchers from the University of California produced for the second time a report determining how much information there is in the world. According to the report, the amount of information stored in the world in 2002 is half a million times greater than the amount of information stored in the US Library of Congress, which contains 19 million books. The Internet alone contains 17 times more information than the amount stored in the Library of Congress (170 terabytes of information).
The researchers estimate that the amount of new information stored in the world in 2002 - in any media - is double compared to the amount of information stored in 1999. In fact, the amount of information created since 1998 is greater than the amount of information created by humans from the dawn of history until that year.
The report is published in the shadow of a debate over the question of whether the new information produced every year helps humanity move forward - or rather hinders it, by producing "background noise" that makes it difficult for people to find the information they are looking for. In 1999, University of California researchers published the first report that attempted to quantify the information stored in the world on paper, film, magnetic media (cassettes, diskettes, hard drives, etc.) and optical media (CDs, DVDs, etc.). To do this, calculate how much volume would be required to store on a hard drive a file in which you scanned a picture, a page from a newspaper or a page number and then perform the necessary multiplications to find out how much volume would be required to store all the information in the world.
The basic unit of digital information is a "byte" - each data character is equal to one byte. From the results of the report, it appears that for every person on the planet, an average of 800 megabytes of information (a megabyte - a million bytes) are stored every year. The annual amount, which can be compared to two floppy disks a day, is double the amount recorded in 1999.
The researchers estimate the volume of all information stored in 2002 at a huge number: about five exabytes. For comparison, if the 19 million books of the Library of Congress were scanned and stored on hard drives, they would take up 10 terabytes - half a million times less.
Where is all this information stored? According to the report, 92% of it is stored on hard drives, 7% is kept on photographic film and another 0.002% on optical media. Although it seems that information printed on paper is everywhere, only 0.01% of all information in the world is printed on paper (books, newspapers, magazines, office documents, etc.).
The amount of stored information is huge, but it is nothing compared to the amount of information that is broadcast on television and radio and transmitted on the Internet and by telephone. If someone wanted to store it all, they would have to purchase 18 exabyte drives. 98% of the amount is produced by people talking on the phone or transmitting information through it. According to the report, there are 1.1 billion landline telephone lines in the world, each of which is spoken for an average of 3,441 minutes per year. The number of cellular lines is estimated at 1.14 billion, and they were used in 2002 for approximately 600 billion call minutes.
In 2002, the radio stations in the world produced about 320 million hours of broadcasting, in a volume of 16,000 terabytes. The television stations produced 123 million hours. According to the report, about 600 million people in the world have access to the Internet, and they used the network to send 5 billion instant messages and about 31 billion e-mail messages every day.
Alex Doron version, Ma'ariv
Drowning in information
Now it is also scientific: the world is drowning in a huge amount of information, the likes of which humanity has never known. For every man, woman and child living on earth - over 6 billion souls - every year humanity produces an amount of information in the volume of 800 megabytes, equivalent to 800 books.
A study done at the University of California at Berkeley describes this situation as a "flood of information". According to the findings, the amount of information produced worldwide has increased by 30% every year since 9991. The quantities stored in libraries and computerized databases have doubled. Last year, there was an addition of 5 million terabytes of information (that is, 5 million megabytes) to the databases and libraries. To clarify how much is involved, the researchers noted that every year an amount of information equal to half a million is accumulated
New libraries, each equal in size to the US Library of Congress.
All this vast information is stored on paper, films, video tapes, and on optical and magnetic technologies. A significant part of it is not found in periodicals and books at all, but in office documents and mail items, including in electronic mail boxes.
Dr. David Lewis, a psychologist and consultant to the business sector who was a member of the research team: "I really think we are suffering from an excess of information. A significant part of what is produced is really unnecessary. A lot of information and data is nothing but garbage."
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