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is information to blame for the great quietus of divine human interaction? ever wonder just how much new information is created every year by people all over the globe? i was recently turned on to a rather doughty study done at berkeley which examinines this very question (’how much new information is created each year?’)… btw, thanks to the folks on the aiip list for turning me on to this…

for those of you unable to process beyond blog-length content, or those with the attention span of a newt, here’s the skinny: “This study is an attempt to estimate how much new information is created each year. Newly created information is distributed in four storage media – print, film, magnetic, and optical – and seen or heard in four information flows – telephone, radio and TV, and the Internet…”

“…Print, film, magnetic, and optical storage media produced about 5 exabytes of new information in 2002. Ninety-two percent of the new information was stored on magnetic media, mostly in hard disks…How big is five exabytes? If digitized with full formatting, the seventeen million books in the Library of Congress contain about 136 terabytes of information; five exabytes of information is equivalent in size to the information contained in 37,000 new libraries the size of the Library of Congress book collections.”

interesting tidbits: the united states produces about 40 percent of new info (mostly raffish, and like 80 percent of the world’s bad music by my own estimates); telephone calls worldwide represented about 98 percent of all electronically transmitted info (study does not break out 900 numbers, sorry)

…and some other wicked interesting factoids from the study which you might use to bore your dates to sleep - related to TV, IM, Email, etc:

“TV worldwide produces about 31 million hours of original programming (70,000 terabytes) out of 123 million total hours of broadcasting” - note: you are watching repeats, and only repeats…

“The World Wide Web contains about 170 terabytes of information on its surface; in volume this is seventeen times the size of the Library of Congress print collections.” - note: 120 terabytes alone might be coming from just scoble’s blog… now that he puts up like 10 postings an hour…

“Instant messaging generates five billion messages a day (750GB), or 274 Terabytes a year.” - note: 4.8 billion messages are like, ‘i hate wayne, don’t you?‘ or, ‘i dunno, what do you wanna do?’

“Email generates about 400,000 terabytes of new information each year worldwide” - note: again, most messages are like, ‘i totally hate legwarmers too!’ or, ‘no way, godfather 2 was the best one’

…and absolutely the most terrifying item: “How we use information. Published studies on media use say that the average American adult uses the telephone 16.17 hours a month, listens to radio 90 hours a month, and watches TV 131 hours a month. About 53% of the U.S. population uses the Internet, averaging 25 hours and 25 minutes a month at home, and 74 hours and 26 minutes a month at work – about 13% of the time.”

IF you were all of those things, then of the 720 average hours in a given month, of which you should be sleeping circa 200 (give or take a few hundred), then you’d basically be occupied by media (in some form) for over 330 hours per month - and since we spend about one-third of our lives ‘waiting for something to happen’ (bus, phone etc) and about another 20-40 hours per month in a bathroom (much higher for ted kennedy), then discount sleep, and you’ve got about 80ish hours to be a genuine, sentient human being…sad, sad world…

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