There are more than 70 million blogs and 150 million Web sites today—a number that is expanding at a rate of approximately ten thousand an hour. Two hundred and ten billion e-mails are sent each day. Say goodbye to the gigabyte and hello to the exabyte, five of which are worth 37,000 Libraries of Congress. In 2006 alone, the world produced 161 exabytes of digital data, the equivalent of three million times the information contained in all the books ever written. By 2010, it is estimated that this number will increase to 988. Pick your metaphor: we’re drowning, buried, snowed under.
From a lengthy piece at Columbia Journalism Review, Overload! Journalism’s battle for relevance in an age of too much information.
This is EXACTLY why I have been saying for years that we need to quit teaching school children WHAT to learn, and focus on teaching them HOW to learn!! There is just too much information to try and memorize it any more. What kids today need to know is how to find out what they need to know when they need to know it. It’s called research, and I don’t mean Wikipedia.
No disagreement, but I find the use of the term “data” in the article to be technical – most of those terabytes are filled with crap.