Getting to grips with information overload

Finding information today is easier than ever before. You have immediate access to the largest library of information that has ever existed: the internet. The problem is wading through yottabytes of information.

We are now able to save in digital form everything visible, audible, or communicated. Today this memory is highly duplicative, with billions of copies of popular music, programs, files, images, etc stored in different places for different reasons.

Tomorrow, with everyone online with high-speed connections, it may be common for PCs and PDAs and cell phones to fetch anything from anywhere and thus eliminate local storage. This is the proverbial ‘cloud’ they talk of.

Search engines have changed the way we do research. If Google has its way, every book, magazine article and more will be searchable.

There will be enough storage space in the world to store everything people create, write, speak, perform, or photograph. We will reach a world in which the average piece of information is never looked at by a human, computers will evaluate everything automatically to decide what should receive the precious resource of human attention.

Today the digital library community outlays their efforts to scan, compress and meta-tag; tomorrow it will have to focus on selection, searching, and quality assessment. In a digital world, the challenge will be finding that which is relevant.

The total of all global data storage in 2010 was roughly 401 billion gigabytes. This data was stored across multiple mediums, including PC hard drives, disc-based media, USB drives, books, movies… the list goes on.

In 2002, digital storage capacity overtook its analogue predecessor. We entered the digital era. If you were to take all that information and store it in books, you could cover the entire area of China in a layer three books deep.

High-capacity hard drives and high-definition media, not to mention mobile technology, have only increased the methods and scope of data storage. The 16-gigabytes on your iPhone doesn’t amount to a speck of dust in relation all of the data stored across the globe.

Frank Romano is professor emeritus at the Rochester Institute of Technology

Units of information

Each unit of measurement is one thousand times larger than the one before.

Byte (8 bits)
A binary decision. One byte = a single character;
6 bytes = a single word; 100 bytes = a punch card

Kilobyte (1,000 bytes)
Two kilobytes = a typewritten page; 100 kilobytes = a low-res photograph; 200 kilobytes = a box of punch cards; 500 kilobytes = a box of punch cards

Megabyte (1million bytes)
Two megabytes = a high-res photograph; five megabytes = Shakespeare’s works; 10 megabytes = a minute of high fidelity audio; 50 megabytes = A digital x-ray; 100 megabytes = a two-volume book; 200 megabytes  = a reel of nine-track tape; 500 megabytes = a CD-ROM

Gigabyte (1 billion bytes)
1 gigabyte = a movie at TV quality; five gigabytes = an 8mm tape; 20 gigabytes = A VHS tape of digital data; 50 gigabytes = a floor of books

Terabyte (1 trillion bytes)
One terabyte = all x-ray films in a large hospital; two terabytes = a research library; 10 terabytes = all print in a national library; 50 terabytes = a
large mass storage system

Petabyte (1 quadrillion bytes)
One petabyte = three years of US government data; two petabytes = all academic research libraries; 20 petabytes = all hard disks in 1998; 200 petabytes = all printed material ever

Exabyte (1 quintillion bytes)
Five exabytes = all words ever spoken

Comment below to have your say on this story.

If you have a news story or tip-off, get in touch at editorial@sprinter.com.au.  

Sign up to the Sprinter newsletter

Leave a comment:

Your email address will not be published. All fields are required

Advertisement

Subscribe To Our Newsletter

Join our mailing list to receive the latest news and updates from our team.
Advertisement