 |
 |
----- Original Message ----- From: "Karl Miller" <[log in to unmask]> > Actually, there are some theorist who believe that we double the total information every ten years...therefore we now have twice as much available information than we had ten years ago. Further, there was a rather loosely prepared study done, (by some researchers at Stanford...I can check if anyone is interested) which suggested that about 85% or more information created today (as of the date of the study...c.2003?) existed in electronic form. Of course that includes video, audio, data, personal files, etc. > Well...we can assume that 99% or more of the information created before about 1900 no longer exists. It was all but impossible to put it in any sort of long-term storage (except for writing it out by hand on a paper [etc.] document and saving that...and it was also very likely to fall victim to various forms of damage or destruction, ranging from fungi to disposal as useless! From that point on, technology made it ever easier to preserve and store data...first photography, then the typewriter (and carbon paper), then moving pictures and practical sound recording...and finally the Apple II and its manifold descendants. With each step, we made it simpler and more practical to save and store our information... while creating archives of information so large as to make individual items essentially inaccessible... I recall having read a science-fiction story about thirty-odd years ago whose plot tried to forecast this scenario. At some future date, civilization had accumulated so much data that uninhabitable planetoid bodies were being used for storage of data...and the whole system was dependent on the existence of bibliographies, catalogs and indices...so that a reference might be to I21:C84:B131 (i.e. the 21st index to the 84th catalog of the 131st bibliography...). One day, the protagonist goes to retrieve a certain fact...and finds out that it isn't where it is supposed to be, nor is much of anything else! As a result, they now have all the information in thousands of worlds...and no way to find any given item therein... Steven C. Barr (all too desriptive of my premises...?!)