Welcome

This site contains presentations, publications, lessons and training materials developed over many years. The site is continually updated so I hope you'll come back often. All content is freely shareable and linkable, but I'd love to hear your comments about any of it. You can always find me at sine@udel.edu.

Come back often!

« Conferences | Main | An amazing class blog »

October 23, 2006

Information overload

The other day I came across this new study, How Much Information 2003. The authors attempt to measure how much new information is created each year. From their site, here is the definition:

"Newly created information is distributed in four storage media: print, film, magnetic, and optical; and seen or heard in four information flows: telephone, radio and TV, and the Internet."

It turns out, that the answer for 2002 was 5 exabytes. Just to give us a sense of the magnitude of this, 5 exabytes is equal to the number of words ever spoken by human beings. Not easy to get our heads around!

Today, I'm in my office all day and I'm trying to make sense of all of the media that is piled up in the past few weeks. I have 64 podcasts, about 20 journals, four large texts, and about seven the e-mail messages. Of course, while I'm writing this more of each of those are arriving. And this count doesn't even include all of the blogs and webpages that are on my list to review.

If there is 5 exabytes of new information every year, how much of it is "new information?" Much of that reading that is piled up for me is repetitious. But I don't have any good way to ferret out just the great stuff that is working in each of those individual podcasts or journals. Beyond that, even if I'm conscientious in keeping up with this reading, what does it mean? Am I able to retrieve the information when it's needed? I'm hopeful, we are teaching students to ask these questions, and I'm really looking forward to a time when I can google my own brain!

Posted by Pat on October 23, 2006 11:27 AM