For Position Only: Collapsing Under Content

Anita Dennis

2

We’ve been hearing about information overload for years, and now there’s a new study that tells us just how much information is really out there. According to two professors at the University of California at Berkeley’s School of Information Management & Systems, the world’s yearly production of unique content is roughly 1.5 billion gigabytes — roughly 250MB for every man, woman, and child on earth.

Other fascinating findings in “How Much Information?” include:

• Printed documents constitute only .003 percent of the total amount of stored information. Digital content is the most rapidly growing form of information; optical and magnetic storage shipments are doubling each year.
• More than 11,000 terabytes (TB) of e-mail is produced each year. That’s 610 billion messages, which is 500 times the number of static Web pages that currently exist (2.1 billion).
• Every year, 7.5 billion office documents — about 195TB of information — are published. Compare this to 25TB of newspapers and 8TB of books.

I could go on: There are stunning statistics about the ratio of public vs. private information (600:1), the rate of growth of the World Wide Web (7.3 million “directly accessible” pages added per day), and more. But you get the idea.

No Recount Required
If your first reaction, like mine, is how the devil anyone can reasonably calculate this stuff, you’d be surprised. The researchers analyzed industry and government reports to draw conclusions about the production of such information as e-mail, videos, DVDs, CDs, broadcast TV and radio, photographs, printed publications, X-rays, feature films, and more. And they factored in considerations such as original vs. duplicated materials, compression techniques, archived data, and worldwide production figures, extrapolating Third World statistics from information about the United States.

“We don’t claim accuracy down to the last bit,” one of the authors, Hal Varian, said in a press release, “but we’re pretty confident that we’ve got the right order of magnitude.”

Seems fair to me. But while the report makes fascinating reading, the emerging trends that the authors cite are hardly earth-shattering: Information is being democratized; print isn’t dead but simply “a very efficient and concentrated form for the communication of information;” and digital information dominates. Many of us long ago already came to the authors’ conclusion: “We are all drowning in a sea of information,” they write. “The challenge is to learn to swim in that sea, rather than drown in it.”

Life Jacket, Anyone?
Still, the report got me thinking. And I’m proud to say that I’m doing my part to make an impact: I’m not just polluting the air with my SUV; I’ve added a few bytes to the total yearly production of information by writing about the report here. In fact, the report itself is doing a fair job of adding to the clutter: After all, it’s available online in HTML or PDF; UC Berkeley released two press releases on it; and at least three other news outlets have written about it — USA Today, The Economist, and Business Week.

Happily, I’m also trendy in other notable ways. I’m busy democratizing data this month, as I finish up a short story that I’m considering self-publishing through iuniverse.com or some other e-book site. This also puts me among the increasing numbers of individuals and businesses that are shunning the print medium for digital.

And yet, I can also boast that I’m among the thousands of information consumers who are tired of the clutter. Take, for example, junk e-mails, and I don’t just mean unsolicited direct e-mail from . I mean e-mails like the one a (dear) friend sent me this morning with the suspect subject line, “PASS IT ALONG TO YOUR WOMEN FRIENDS!” Just about anything circulated to or forwarded from “undisclosed recipients” ends up in my Trash, including e-mail petitions and chain letters that I receive regularly from the most well-intentioned and politically correct friends and colleagues. Some days, the volume of e-mail spam that arrives in my inbox puts the amount of paper junk mail that slides into my post box to shame.

And then I think of all the redundant information being produced by dozens of Web sites, thanks to our ongoing difficulty electing a President: the most recent Florida vote count for Bush and Gore; the maps depicting the red states for Bush, the blue states for Gore, and the gray states that are hanging in the wind. The same news is then reported in the morning paper (and the afternoon paper, if you live in one of the few remaining cities that supports such a quaint notion), and updated with up-to-the-minute revisions on local and national, network and cable news shows –at 5 p.m., 6 p.m., 10 p.m., and 11 p.m.

Take a Memo
My point is this: We want it all these days. We want to publish information, and we want to consume it. We want to control not only the distribution of our own information but also how and what we receive back from the world. The conundrum is obvious. As my mother and most others always said: You can’t have your cake and eat it, too. If we’re going to publish, then we’re going to clutter our world, whether it’s our hard drives or our servers or our file cabinets or bookshelves. And we’re going to have to sort through everyone else’s publishing, too.

But just think how much space we could save if there were no more reports telling us there’s too much information out there, and no more columnists to rant about it.