A little information about a lot of information
Are you also unable to overcome the abundance of information flooding you? Now, thanks to a group of researchers from the School of Information Systems and Management at the University of California, Berkeley, you can at least know exactly how much you're losing. The answer is about two exabytes (an exabyte is about a billion times a billion bytes) - this is the amount of information that is produced in the world every year.
Evaluating the global information output appears to be a rather unnecessary task. But very quickly, the authors of the study note, it will be possible to gain access to almost all the information stored in the world. This raises several questions. How much information is there, and how much space will be required to store it.
The path to the answers to these questions was easier than expected. There are four main storage methods: paper, film, optical discs and magnetic storage devices. Take for example the film. According to the US Department of Commerce, more than 80 billion photos are taken worldwide each year; According to UNESCO, the number of films produced each year is 4,250; And 2 billion x-rays are done every year.
The researchers translated these numbers into bytes - 5 megabytes for a picture, 4,000 megabytes for a film, 8 megabytes for an X-ray - and added them together. The researchers admit that their numbers are not entirely accurate: it is difficult, for example, to distinguish between original information and its copies; Newspapers are often published both on paper and online. But despite these difficulties, it is still possible to base some conclusions on the basis of the researchers' assessments. One of them is the so-called "democratization of information": it is private individuals around the world who create and store most of the information - about 740 thousand terabytes (one thousand billion bytes) per year out of a little more than two million terabytes in total. All the information stored on paper – books, documents, newspapers and magazines – adds up to a total of 240 terabytes.
The researchers also calculated the amount of information produced by types of communication such as e-mail, radio and telephone calls - information that will likely be systematically stored in archives in the near future. The results are amazing: about 610 billion e-mails are sent every year in the United States; This information adds up to 11 terabytes. But this is nothing compared to the mountain of information produced by phone calls: 576 thousand terabytes.
All these numbers may just add to the general information overload, but there are some figures among them that, even if not completely reliable, are quite impressive. Did you know, for example, that every year approximately one million books are printed in the world, each of 300 pages on average? And that the photocopiers, printers and other machines emit about 15 trillion pages a year? And that the CD shipments in 1999 contained about 2.5 million CDs?
The authors of the study point out that while humanity produces more and more information, it does not consume more than it did eight years ago - at least not in the United States. The total time spent reading, watching television or listening to music in homes in the United States increased only slightly - from 3,324 hours in 1992 to 3,380 hours in 2000.
(Originally published on 22.10)
Economist
{Appeared in Haaretz newspaper, 24/10/2000}
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