“Data deluge will reboot our brains”
A great title, and an interesting article based on a study looking at how data consumption has changed over 30 years. It’s been conducted by the University of California and suggests that we consume on average 34 gigabytes of information each day!
The speed of modern life is 2.3 words per second, or about 100,000 words a day
I blogged about it in the summer of last year – Information Overload – when an article as written about how Google was making us stupid.
The total amount of words “consumed” in the United States has more than doubled from 4,500 trillion in 1980 to 10,845 trillion in 2008.
For me with the web and technology as my passion I find the rate of change challenging, but am relatively well read, and have a history of what today’s article in The Times refers to as ‘deep thinking’.
Total information consumption from televisions, computers and other media was estimated at 3.6 zettabytes (3.6m million gigabytes) in 2008.
This will no doubt be the biggest challenge for this generation and the next – how do you quickly access information that is grounded, and with depth. Until the day when we have a Matrix-like cortex information download facility I feel history is indeed likely to change for the worse.
Read the whole article here: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/science/living/article6954748.ece
Filed under: change
