Blog Post: Data, Information and…
Through all of mankind’s history, we have told stories, shared knowledge, sought information and written down elements of everyday life, history and science. Today, it takes mankind only two days to produce just as much information as we did through all of history up to 2003.
Two days ago, at the Techonomy conference in California, Google CEO Eric Schmidt revealed something we find truly astonishing: for every two days we create as much information as we did up to 2003.
Take a few seconds to embrace that fact.
Through all of mankind’s history, we have told stories, shared knowledge, sought information and written down elements of everyday life, history and science. Today, it takes mankind only two days to produce just as much information as we did through all of history up to 2003. That is truly fascinating.
And how do we manage to produce all this information and content? Well, according to Eric Schmidt, it all comes down to user-generated content. And with more than 500 million Facebook profiles, millions of blogs, Twitter-accounts, YouTube profiles and the like, there’s a solid foundation for the creation of an abundance of information and content. On a side note, Google’s book cataloguing project, Google Books, have calculated that there’s around 129,864,880 books in the world.
The result of these incomprehensible amounts of data? Complexity. Just imagine the time spent on creating all this content, the massive quantity of servers making it possible – let alone the possibilities we have created for doing… well, everything whilst being online. And, not to forget, the challenges created for people, professionals and companies. That’s complexity.