Swamped by data
by Sam Roggeveen
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16 March 2010 1:40PM
From The Economist:
The amount of digital information increases tenfold every five years...A vast amount of that information is shared. By 2013 the amount of traffic flowing over the internet annually will reach 667 exabytes, according to Cisco, a maker of communications gear. And the quantity of data continues to grow faster than the ability of the network to carry it all.
New media analyst Clay Shirky has pointed out that 'information overload' has been a problem almost since the invention of the printing press, and clearly the internet has made the problem massively worse. But there's really no solving this problem, since we probably wouldn't like the measures necessary to stop the flow of information anyway. The best we can do is to develop new tools to cope with the amount of data we're blasted with.
As Shirky says: 'It's not information overload. It's filter failure'.
Photo by Flickr user kmevans, used under a Creative Commons license.
