Name(s):
Information explosion
Information overload
Excessive data
Accumulation of knowledge
Background
"If we lose our memory we have no soul," declares Umberto Eco, Italian author, historian and philosopher, looking at how history and tradition can inform or imprison societies. Eco suggests that the World Wide Web is rather like the mind of a man who could not forget anything, and posed the question: who is filtering our information today? Eco states: "We need a new art of dissemination - it's indispensable." We need the mediation of groups to filter and feed information so that society can function properly. If every person in the world had a different ideology it would be dangerous - leading to 6 billion different languages, all pidgin and all in disagreement, like the Tower of Babel.
Incidence
World book titles increased 132% between 1950 and 1979. At any given time 3,000 million titles may be in print. Estimates suggest that there are about 80,000 regular scientific and technical journals out of a total of about 150,000 journals with valid information content. As an example, it took 32 years from 1907 to 1938 before Chemical Abstracts reached its millionth abstract; the fifth million was reached in 3 years and 4 months. According to the area of science chosen and the method used, an annual growth rate of 4 to 8% is encountered with a doubling period of from 10 to 15 years. A spectacular example of the ability of information to reach people is the over 3,500% increase in television receivers since 1950, totalling some 500 million receivers in present use; this indicates an appetite for information that will be increasingly served by 24 hour programming, hundreds of television broadcasting stations, and thousands of dependent companies producing informational, educational or documentary programmes and films. In the decade from 1979 to 1989 the National Space Science Data Centre of the USA has accumulated some 6,000,000,000,000, or six trillion, bytes of information. That is about double the amount of information contained in all of the Library of Congress's 19 million books. The space probe of Venus, Magellan will increase this by an additional three trillion bytes. The Hubble Space Telescope scheduled to be launched in 1990 will generate several trillion bytes every year. If the Earth Observing System is launched, it will generate a trillions bytes of information every day. A host of other space probes are planned.