Stats On The Amount Of Info Overload
As Of 2001
This is readily supported by statistics of the sort often quoted [17]:
- a weekly edition of the New York Times contains more information than the average person was likely to come across in a lifetime in seventeenth-century England
- the English language of the late 20th century contains about 50,000 words, five times more than in Shakespeare’s lifetime
- the collections of the large US research libraries doubled between 1876 and 1990
- over one thousand books were published each day across the world during 1990
- more information has been created in the past 30 years than in the previous 5,000 years
- the number of records in publicly available online databases increased from 52 million in 1975 to 6.3 thousand million in 1994
- the number of documents on the Internet doubled from 400 million to 800 million from 1998 to 2000
- it would take over 200,000 years to ‘read all the Internet’, allowing 30 minutes per document.
As Of 2020
- A weekly edition of the New York Times in the early years of the 21st century contained more information than the average person was likely to come across in a lifetime in seventeenth century England (Bawden and Robinson 2009)
- More information was created in the last three decades of the 20th century than in the previous 5000 years (Bawden and Robinson 2009)
- In 2012 about 2.5 exabytes of data were created each day, with the amount doubling every 3 years, and more data were transmitted across the Internet each second that were stored in the whole internet 20 years previously (McAfee et al. 2012) 15
- In the late 1970s, it was estimate that it would take seven hundred years to read one year's research literature in one subject (chemistry) (Bernier 1978)
- By 2012, enough data was being generated each day to fill all the libraries in the United States eight times over (Floridi 2014B).
- It is literally impossible to read all relevant material, even within a narrow speciality given by (Fraser and Dunstan 2010). They envisage a trainee in the speciality of cardiac imaging setting out to read the directly relevant medical literature. Reading 40 papers a day five days a week, they would require over 11 years to bring themselves up to date. By the time they had finished, another 82,000 relevant papers would have been published, requiring another 8 years reading.
- In January 2019, a Google search for the phrase "information overload" produces over three million items. A search in the Web of Knowledge database of academic literature retrieved over 3,000 articles, while searches in bibliographic databases of subjects such as business, psychology and social sciences typically each found a thousand items. (Study: Information Overload—An Overview)