Digital Information Explosion

Narratives

Narrative 1

Elizabeth stares at her screen. It feels a bit like an extension of herself, if she’s honest about it. Or like a best friend. Especially during a boring, boring class.

She’s supposedly paying attention to a truly stultifying lecture on Justice. It’s part of the core curriculum and something she more or less has to take in her first year of college. The teacher is droning on.

IM from Elizabeth to Keisha, a friend from Second Life who is taking the class as a distance student: “u watching this? This guy is just mailing it in, K. What a waste.” Then: “I wonder if he thinks about the fact that we pay for this.”

Keisha, by reply click: “Yeah, I’m watching – sort of.” Send. New entry: “If u can call it that. Reading blogs, mainly, tho.”

E: “Me 2. Did u see Wonkette today? They had that sicko Saddam video up.”

K: “Can’t believe they did that. Can’t believe he’s dead.”

E: “Yeah. Justice, huh? This guy should be talking about whether Saddam got justice. Iraq: Got Justice?”

K: “Hey, that’s a good line. You should blog it.”

E: “Already did. Check your feed. Here, don’t bother, click on this: http://elizajournal.typepad.com/011007/iraq-got-justice.htm [note: not a real link!]

K: “Did you see what Drudge had on it?”

E: “Nope will check.”

K: “L8r – hey, trying to tune in to class here for a minute or two before it ends… After all, we’re paying for this, right?”

Introduction to Information Explosion

Information explosion describes the high rate at which new information is produced and published. The large amount of new information, along with vast archives of previously-published information, leads to a state of information overload.

Relevant issues for discussion include: Who is producing this information? for whom? Does the newly published information contradict other information? How do we combat misinformation? How do we wade through a sea of information to find what we want? How is it stored and through what channels does it flow?

Of the new information that is published (and the internet has made it easy for anybody to do so in a number of forms), how much of it is thoughtful, researched and useful to others and how much of it is stream-of-consciousness banter that holds little value to the majority of the users who can access it? Benkler notes that the nature of the network allows for clusters of interest (formed by mutual interest, not capital investment) to form a "backbone of attention." The peer review process then enables useful information to percolate through this backbone, from local clusters to regional ones and finaly to "super star" websites visited by millions.

Some Data on Information Explosion

Amount of information

- Lyman & Varian (2003) “estimate that the amount of new information stored on paper, film, magnetic, and optical media has about doubled in the last three years. . . . Information flows through electronic channels - telephone, radio, TV, and the Internet - contained almost 18 exabytes of new information in 2002, three and a half times more than is recorded in storage media. Ninety eight percent of this total is the information sent and received in telephone calls - including both voice and data on both fixed lines and wireless.”

- WWW contains about 170 terabytes of information on its surface - 17 times the size of the Library of Congress print collections (Lyman & Varian 2003)

- Email generates about 400,000 terabytes of new information each year worldwide (Lyman & Varian 2003)

- IM generates five billion messages a day (750GB), or 274 Terabytes a year ; AOL users exchanged anout 400 million messages per day in 1999 and 2 billion per day in June 2003 (# add reference and update!)

Diversity of sources

- billions of web pages, usenet messages, etc.; size of Google index at about 6 billion items in 2004, but will not be disclosed anymore (Eric Schmidt asks users to guess the size of the new index, NYT 2005).

- 439,286,364 hosts advertised in the DNS (July 2006), Internet Systems Consortium: Internet Domain Survey, Jul 2006

- 94,546,719 domains registered as .biz, .com, .net, .org, .us, whois.net

- On July 31, 2006, Technorati tracked its 50 millionth blog, Sifry's State of the Blogosphere

Increased use of Internet as information medium

- [# add latest Pew Internet & American Lifetime Project Report]

From Urs Gasser, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: An Essay on Information Quality Governance on the Internet (Draft 2006).

Problems

What is the process of news and information gathering?

1. grazing 2. deep dive 3. feedback loop

Relevant Research

Lyman/Varian: How Much Information? (2003)

Franck: The Economy of Attention (1999)

Goldhaber: The Attention Economy and the Net (1997)

Teens Can Multitask, But What Are Costs? (Washington Post, 2007)

Wolpert: Multi-Tasking adversely affects brain's learning, UCLA psychologists report, 2006

Time: The Multitasking Generation, 2006

Nielsen: IM, Not IP (Information Pollution), 2003

Basex: The High Cost of Interruption Report, 2005 and Measuring Interruption, 2005

Kaiser Family Foundation: Media-Multi Tasking, changing the amount and nature of young people's media use, 2005

Weinberger (Blog): Blogs, Journalism, and correction, incl. Long Tail Argument, 2007

Pew Study: Tagging, 2006

Pew Study: E-Gov, 2007

Pew Study: Blogging, 2006

Trust Without Knowledge: How Young Persons Carry out Research on the Internet (Gardner, 2006)