How Much Data Did You Create Last Year?
from the plenty dept
Suffering from information overload? It's only getting worse. A new study has shown that the average person created 800 MBytes of data last year, leading to "5 exabytes of new information stored in print, film, magnetic, and optical storage media." If you're wondering, that's 5,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes. The report says that's twice as much info as was created just 3 years ago, so we're only growing more prolific in all that information we're spewing on a regular basis. Of course, that 5 exabytes is only information that was stored. The study says that a total of 18 exabytes "flowed electronically over TV, radio, telephone, and the Internet in 2002." If you want details of how this was all calculated you can check out the project page and then argue about how they calculated these numbers. Even ignoring the actual numbers, you can still conclude we're creating a hell of a lot of information (whether useful or not) on a regular basis and it's only going to increase. The study does have some interesting findings, showing that the vast majority of info flowed over telephone networks, and that 93% of Kazaa users are downloaders - not offering their own files up for sharing . Also, because we never shut up, it appears that we Americans are responsible for about 40% of the world's stored information created last year.
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Hmmm
If data does keep growing, will data disposal become as serious a problem as garbage disposal? Will vast mountains of hard drives need to be made to store mostly worthless data?
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New Sources of Digital Data
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Reminds me of a Stupid Article
So I remember reading this article a few years ago where the main argument is that because more and more data would be stored as society advanced that we would all become reincarnated. We are all simply a collection of information - memories, ideas, etc. - and as information storage expands exponentially, everything we are - memories and ideas - would be recreated, thus giving us all immortality.
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