This study is an attempt to estimate how much new information is created each year. Newly created information is distributed in four storage media -- print, film, magnetic, and optical -- and seen or heard in four information flows -- telephone, radio and TV, and the Internet. This study of information storage and flows analyzes the year 2002 in order to estimate the annual size of the stock of new information contained in storage media, and heard or seen each year in information flows. An accompanying tidbit from Ross Mayfield, to the theme of the recent Jim Gray interview with ACM Queue, blogged here: Netflix ships 1,500 terabytes worth of information a day. Andrew Odlyzko suggests that daily traffic flow on the Net is 2,000 terabytes. |