My best wishes to all friends, readers and visitors to this site. I hope 2006 proves both prosperous and peaceful for you.
At the start of the New Year, I just wish to set before us all here the sobering fact of the unceasing explosion in information! These tables come from the research project, 'How Much Information? 2003', School of Information & Management Systems, Berkeley. The first is useful in itself, but it's the second that really concerns me here.
From the study:
Information is recorded, stored and distributed in four physical media – paper, film, magnetic, and optical. Good data is available for the worldwide production of each storage medium, providing an upper bound for the potential production of original information and copies. There are often good estimates for how much original content is produced in each of these different storage formats, particularly for the advanced economies that produce the most information. Where those data don’t exist we have adopted working assumptions to make our estimates; these assumptions are documented in the full report and, as in 2000, we welcome suggestions for improving them.
Table 1.2 summarizes yearly worldwide production of original stored content “circa 2002,” because Paper and Film statistics are largely from 2001 while Magnetic and Optical are largely from 2002. Detailed source information and the inferences that were used to produce these calculations are presented in detail in the web pages on Paper, Film, Magnetic, and Optical …
Summary estimates show that the storage of new information has been growing at a rate of over 30% a year (upper estimate, uncompressed). There has been dramatic growth in storage of new information over the past two years in every storage medium except film. Film-based content – especially photographs – is migrating to digital media, both optical and magnetic.
I came across this study via Alex Barnett's blog (Alex Barnett being International Program Manager for MSDN and TechNet, Microsoft). He's been reading John Seely Brown's and Paul Duguid's The Social Life of Information. Alex quotes this from the book: 'Storage does not correlate with
significance, nor volume with value. Standing atop gigabytes,
terabytes, and even exabytes of information will not necessarily help
us see further. It may only put our heads in the clouds'.
Alex asks how much of the new information generated each year is online. Using the 2002 data from the SIMS study (the study is cited in the revised, 2002 edition of Brown's and Duguid's book), he writes:
Very little it turns out. There are 1,048,576 terabytes in an exabyte. The total amount of information produced in 2002 was 5,242,880 terabytes. The surface www (static pages) contained about 170 terabytes of information in 2002, about 0.003% of the total amount of information produced in 2003. Or to put it another way, there were 33,000 times more information created in 2002 than there was stored on the static web. … the web has a long, long way to go before it truly becomes the storage network of all the world's information. We are only scratching the surface in this regard. … even if we could get all this online we need to make all this content useful - it is one thing to publish the world's video and audio content online, it is quite another to make it searchable and relevant. … we want more information available to us, but as we achieve our goals how are we going to deal with the ever increasing amount of information?
All of which set me thinking again of Gordon Bell and MyLifeBits. This first caught my eye in March, 2004. The Guardian carried a piece about him just before Christmas, two parts of which have stayed with me:
As far as Microsoft is concerned, the digital database, known as MyLifeBits, is a unique challenge for the company's programmers. If all of our computers will one day store even a minor mountain of detail from our public and private lives, how will we ever be able to organise it? What software will rummage through our electronic minds for connected events, perhaps a conversation about a picture taken on some seaside trip on a dank day one May? …
How much memory does a life need?
Microsoft researchers believe that technological advances will ensure one terabyte of memory is enough to store everything except video for 83 years. Many iPods have 20 gigabytes of memory, or one fiftieth of a terabyte. If we recorded video constantly, we would need an extra 200 terabytes of memory.
The first of these quoted paragraphs is the one I'm thinking about the most. I thought Jyri was right when he wrote, back in 2004:
In commercial visions like Microsoft's MyLifeBits priority is often given to the image of a jukebox of personal memory artefacts. My guess is blogs, on the other hand, would emphasize the inherent connectedness of individual memory to a constantly evolving social context.
Capturing technologies shape the very nature of remembering as they become intertwined in our daily routines of our self-creation.
I still think he's right. Storage does not correlate with significance, but blogs are a way of doing something … more selective, more social, more connected — to the individual memory, to that individual's 'constantly evolving social context'.
