Thats what you call information overload

Rebcca Blood reports:

The quantity and flow of information is exploding at an amazing rate. The amount of new information stored on paper, film, magnetic and optical media has roughly doubled in the last three years. Five exabytes of new information -- roughly five billion gigabytes -- was created in 2002 alone. Each year almost 800 MB of recorded information is produced per person (to have an idea: 5 MB is needed to store the complete works of Shakespeare) . If stored on paper, that would take about 30 feet of books. But 92% of all that new information is stored on magnetic media, mostly hard disks, rather than on paper, film or optical media.

But there's much more than stored information. Information flowing through electronic channels --telephone (both cellular and landline), radio, TV and the Internet -- is far larger. Almost 18 exabytes of new information was generated in 2002, three and a half times more than the amount stored. Five billion instant messages per day produce 274 terabytes a year. (A terabyte is about 1,000 gigabytes.) E-mail racks up about 400,000 terabytes of new information each year worldwide. About 31 billion e-mails are sent daily, a figure which is expected to double by 2006. E-mail ranks second behind the telephone as the largest information flow. E-mail users include 35% of the total U.S. population and accounts for over 35% of time spent on the Internet. The UC-Berkeley study estimates that about one-third of all e-mail is spam.

Now how we can utilize these loads of information? Make them accessible online, with proper copyright and compensations ofcourse. More and more people should be PC/internet savvy and use the required information among all the information for their daily necessities. Or would people be disgusted with the information overload and shy away from PC/internet?