The Future Foretold/Information Overload
From The Endtime
| The Future Foretold | ||
| Globetrotters and Jetsetters | Information Overload | The Pagan Revival |
"Knowledge shall increase" (Daniel 12:4).
It is with good cause that the term "information overload" was coined in recent years. If the amount of information that is available is an indication of the knowledge available, knowledge has increased within our generation almost beyond imagination! Here are just a few mind-boggling facts on this:
- The world produces between 1 and 2 exabytes of unique information [print, film, optical, and magnetic content] per year, which is roughly 250 megabytes for every man, woman, and child on earth. An exabyte is a billion gigabytes, or 1018 bytes, or roughly the equivalent to the textual content of a billion books.
- In 2000 the World Wide Web consisted of about 21 terabytes of static HTML pages, and is growing at a rate of 100 percent per year. One terabyte … is a million megabytes, or the equivalent of the textual content of a million books. Many Web pages are generated on-the-fly from data in databases, so the total size of the "deep Web" is considerably larger.[1] Google™, the Web's largest [and fastest growing] search engine, has indexed more than 3 billion documents, including 2 billion Web pages.[2]
- Around a million books are printed annually (that's titles, not copies), 25,276 newspapers are published (that is separate newspapers, such as the International Herald Tribune, not the number of issues), 40,000 scholarly journals, 80,000 mass-market periodicals, 40,000 newsletters.[3]
- According to Dr. Malcolm Todd, one-time president of the American Medical Association, about half of all medical knowledge is outdated every ten years.
Commenting on recent advances in computer technology, Professor Peter Cochrane of the British Telecom Laboratories' Advanced Application Division said, "There are now wristwatches that wield more computing ability than some 1970s mainframes. Ordinary cars today have more 'intelligence' than the original lunar lander."[4]
Seventy percent of all information in our global society has been created since the start of the Internet and is currently doubling every three years. This means we will have 16 times more information than we have today by 2015.[5]
Although we have made tremendous strides scientifically and technologically, are we more fulfilled or happier than our predecessors? Our knowledge has radically increased, but much of our scientific genius has been squandered in the development of armaments and weapons of mass destruction. Hi-tech gadgets and luxuries are given priority while many of our fellow humans are hungry and destitute.
Time magazine examined this in their 1995 cover story "The Evolution of Despair":
VCRs and microwave ovens have their virtues, but in the everyday course of our highly efficient lives, there are times when something seems deeply amiss. ... Whatever the source of stress, we at times get the feeling that modern life isn't what we were designed for.
Rates of depression have been doubling in some industrial countries roughly every 10 years. Suicide is the third most common cause of death among young adults in North America, after car wrecks and homicides. Fifteen percent of Americans have had a clinical anxiety disorder.[6]What good is a head full of knowledge if our hearts are empty and we lack peace of mind and purpose in life?
[edit] Notes and References
- ↑ Lyman, Peter & Hal R. Varian, How Much Information. School of Information Management and Systems at the University of California at Berkeley
- ↑ "The Wonderful Wizards of Google," NewsFactor Network, 22 Jul 2002
- ↑ UNESCO 1996, ISSN 2001, Ulrich's 2000, Oxbridge Directory 1997
- ↑ "Future Computers Will Talk to Owners—Study," Reuters, 4 Jun 1995
- ↑ Taken from the "Strategic Survey on the Future of Space Education in Preparation for the March 2003 Workshop on the Future of Space Education, Washington, D.C."
- ↑ Wright, Robert. "The Evolution of Despair," Time, 28 Aug 1995
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