In 2006, the world produced 161 “exabytes” of digital information - 3 million times the amount of information contained in all the books ever written. Next year, the world will produce 988 exabytes of data.
The Week, via the Columbia Journalism Review
…no wonder I have lost all ability to focus on one thing at a time. As the full article says, “Pick your metaphor: we’re drowning, buried, snowed under.” It’s making me crazy!
And a comment that reposts the forward of a book I read in college (Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death), which posits that the future of Brave New World is more likely than 1984:
As [Huxley] saw it, people will come to…adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think. What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.
Postman wrote that in 1985, referring to the proliferation of television. Frightening how prescient it was so long before we all started Twittering. I need to turn off my computer and reread both books.
