Narratives

Narrative 1

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

Sheâs supposedly paying attention to a truly stultifying lecture on Justice. Itâs 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: âu watching this? This guy is just mailing it in, K. What a waste.â Then: âI wonder if he thinks about the fact that we pay for this.â

Keisha, by reply click: âYeah, Iâm watching â sort of.â Send. New entry: âIf u can call it that. Reading blogs, mainly, tho.â

E: âMe 2. Did u see Wonkette today? They had that sicko Saddam video up.â

K: âCanât believe they did that. Canât believe heâs dead.â

E: âYeah. Justice, huh? This guy should be talking about whether Saddam got justice. Iraq: Got Justice?â

K: âHey, thatâs a good line. You should blog it.â

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

K: âDid you see what Drudge had on it?â

E: âNope will check.â

K: âL8r â hey, trying to tune in to class here for a minute or two before it endsâ¦ After all, weâre paying for this, right?â

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) âestimate 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.â

- 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!)