Wednesday, November 12, 2003

Editorial Observer: Trying to Measure the Amount of Information That Humans Create: "Do you know what an exabyte is? I didn't until I started reading a new report, called 'How Much Information? 2003,' from the University of California at Berkeley's School of Information Management and Systems. An exabyte turns out to be a billion gigabytes. Most new computers, by comparison, come with hard drives around 40 to 100 gigabytes in size.

The authors of the report estimate that in 2002 the human species stored about five exabytes of new information on paper, film, optical or magnetic media, a number that doubled in the past three years. Five exabytes, as it happens, is equivalent to all words ever spoken by humans since the dawn of time.

To gauge how much new information humans now produce in a given year, you have to imagine digitizing and storing all of it, including forms of information that aren't already digital and forms that aren't usually stored, including all e-mail messages, all the Web pages on the entire Internet and all telephone conversations. "


As the authors point out, "The striking finding here is that most of the total volume of new information flows is derived from the volume of voice telephone traffic, most of which is unique content." In 2002, that telephone traffic added up to about 17 exabytes, more than three times all the words ever spoken by humans until that point.

Staring at numbers and comparisons like this, which are more than merely boggling, is enough to make you wonder just what information is. Perhaps it seems obvious to say that information of the kind that can be stored and counted up is created and consumed entirely by humans. So let me say it another way. Our idea of information is meaningless to the rest of creation. The cocoon of data and language that humans live in goes undetected by the rest of earth's organisms. In all those exabytes of chatter there are words, of course, that refer to something beyond the narrow bounds of human experience. But vast quantities of what gets cataloged as information are purely self-referential, talk about the act of talking, so to speak. That is partly what makes us human.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/12/opinion/12WED4.html

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