The Economist Byte counters
"ALREADY drowning in too much information? At least you can now find out precisely how much you are missing: about two exabytes. (An exabyte is roughly a billion times a billion bytes, or the quivalent of about 20 billion copies of The Economist). This is the estimated amount of unique information the world is currently producing each year. At least, it is the figure calculated by a group of researchers at the School for Information Systems and Management at the University of California, Berkeley, led by Peter Lyman and Hal Varian.

Estimating the world’s information output appears a rather superfluous undertaking. But soon, the authors of the study point out, it will be technologically possible for an average person to obtain access to virtually all recorded information."

UCB: School of Information Management and Systems How Much Information
"Printed material of all kinds makes up less than .003 percent of the total storage of information. This doesn't imply that print is insignificant. Quite the contrary: it simply means that the written word is an extremely efficient way to convey information.

The second striking fact is the ``democratization of data.'' A vast amount of unique information is created and stored by individuals. Original documents created by office workers are more than 80% of all original paper documents, while photographs and X-rays together are 99% of all original film documents. Camcorder tapes are also a significant fraction of total magnetic tape storage of unique content, with digital tapes being used primarily for backup copies of material on magnetic drives.

As for hard drives, roughly 55% of the total are installed in single-user desktop computers. Of course, much of the content on individual user's hard drives is not unique, which accounts for the large difference between the upper and lower bounds for magnetic storage. However, as more and more image data moves onto hard drives, we expect to see the amount of digital content produced by individuals stored on hard drives increase dramatically.

This democratization of data is quite remarkable. A century ago the average person could only create and access a small amount of information. Now, ordinary people not only have access to huge amounts of data, but are also able to create gigabytes of data themselves and, potentially, publish it to the world via the Internet, if they choose to do so.

The third interesting finding is the "dominance of digital" content. Not only is digital information production the largest in total, it is also the most rapidly growing. While unique content on print and film are hardly growing at all, optical and digital magnetic storage shipments are doubling each year. Even today, most textual information is "born digital,'' and within a few years this will be true for images as well. Digital information is inexpensive to copy and distribute, is searchable, and is malleable. Thus the trend towards democratization of data---especially in digital form---is likely to continue."

USA Today Society grappling with info overload
"This is an important milestone, says David Shenk, author of Data Smog: Surviving the Information Glut. "It's a sea change in how human beings deal with one another. It's no longer a question of access to information, but the challenge of weeding through to find what you need.""

""We have to be a lot more attentive to how well information is designed," Lyman says. "Until now, we've thought of information in the context of the medium it's stored in. Now we'll start to think of the medium in the context of how it's used.""

IBM Systems Journal It's not just information
"When people think about computers, they often think about information. They talk about information technology, the information age, the information superhighway. They discuss how computers enable people to send, access, and manipulate information in many new ways.

Similarly, when people think about education and learning, they often think about information. They discuss what information people need to know to be literate in today's society, and they discuss new ways for teachers to teach (and for students to learn) that information. Not surprisingly, they expect that new information technologies will open new opportunities for teaching and learning.

But this focus on information is limiting and distorting. If we want to take full advantage of new computational technologies, and if we want to help people become better thinkers and learners, we need to move beyond these information-centric views of computing and learning. "

"Simply “broadcasting” ideas, in an information-centric way, will not work. For new ideas to spread and thrive, they must build upon ideas and practices that already exist in the local culture. As a result, new ideas are likely to take hold in different ways in different places. Finding ways to support and nurture that process is our biggest challenge for the future."