When I first started in this business, computers were huge installations that worked off of punched cards to put information in mainframes. Ma Bell sent out phone bills that included punched cards you were supposed to send back in with your check.
Sometimes, when the phone company would irritate folks, subscribers would steam iron the punch cards (thus shrinking the holes and forcing employees to put the information in manually). What rebels we were.
And how naive about how quickly our world would change. The computing powers that filled rooms in the 1960s now fit on most laptop computers. And information available to people all over the world is aggregating at an alarming rate.
An article in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer by Tom Paulson quotes a new study saying that the amount of information in the world is doubling every three years. And you wondered why you felt you had trouble keeping up?
Paulson’s article notes: “The researchers [information scientists from the University of California Berkeley] concluded that the amount of new information produced last year was about 23 exabytes. An exabyte is a million terabytes. A terabyte is a million megabytes — roughly equivalent to the content of a million books.”
Whew.
Now, aside from the intellectual fun of knowing this much information is flowing onto our plates, it’s important to know that the study says most of this information “isn’t very interesting,” according to Paulson’s piece.
In other words, if you missed 95 percent of it, you would be no worse for wear. Your competitive edge would be intact.
The flow of information “across televisions, radios, telephones, Web sites and the Internet,” according to Paulson’s story, “increased by 3.5 times to a new total of 18 exabytes as of 2002.” I wonder if this includes the Viagra and porn site spam?
There is even more information that has been stored but not transmitted over the Internet, according to the study — about five exabytes.
I bring this study up for an important reason. Readers across the country have told newspapers they feel assaulted by the amount of information beamed at them every day. In a world increasingly wired, turned on and packed with pleas for attention, many folks feel overwhelmed. What to listen to and what to read when there are eight other simultaneous demands on a person’s time?
That’s where newspapers come in. As low-tech as they seem, they are produced by people who are professionals at sniffing out news and bringing it to you in a convenient form every morning. They are printed on paper, so you can cut out articles to use as reminders of activities or team schedules or a new recipe to try.
While you may not always appreciate the news judgment of editors at this or other newspapers, over a week’s time, you will get a good snapshot of what’s important in your state, your nation and your world. This snapshot in time will cover the spectrum of human activities and aspirations. It will lay out the best and the worst of humanity.
It will have human comedy and tragedy and a soupcon of the odd for flavor.
One quality this information will have over an exercise in trying to pull this information off the Internet yourself is that the information in this and other newspapers will have been assembled by professional reporters in Utah and the nation and the world who subscribe to a set of standards about verifying information and examining records.
It is written and put into the paper by professional editors and writers who worry about the exact meaning of words, who demonstrate news judgment on a daily basis and who are not apt to lead you astray in your search for meaning in your world.
Simply, the staff of a newspaper searches for and delivers news to you, so you are not forced to cut time from an already busy schedule to find the news yourself. So, if the few minutes you take with your morning newspaper make you feel less hassled and more prepared to meet your world, thank a journalist.
