Friday, May 1, 2009

The Information is too Loud!

The Swine flu virus scare has me thinking about the media, and more generally about the amount of information that bombards us every day. Remember how the four elements of resonance are power, coherence, tuning, and damping? Information is like sound.  If there's too much of it, we get crazy, and try to find ways of filtering it or turning down the volume

I found a study at the University of California at Berkeley that quantifies the amount 0f information the world is producing, and how fast it's growing.  The figures are astounding.

1.  The world produced about 5 new exabytes of information in 2002.  An exabyte is 1,000 petabytes.  A petabyte is 1,000 terabytes.  And a terabyte is 1,000 gigytes.  Another way to think about it:  an exabyte is 37,000 Library of Congresses.  Humans produced 185,000 Library of Congresses worth of information in 2002.

2.  With a world population of 6.4 billion, that amounts to 800 MB of new recorded information per person.  That's the equivalent of 30 feet of books.

3.  Information production has been growing 30% a year.

What that means on a day-to-day basis is that we can't possibly absorb the information that comes at us each day.  It's like an extremely loud and constant noise.  There's some discomfort, and we try to find ways of turning it down and filtering it.  We also look for coherence within it, trying to tune into the frequencies that we need.

This creates fear and anxiety, and changes our primary need from one of finding information, to one of finding coherence and meaning within the information we're getting.  In information resonance terms, we need less power and more resonance.

As "listeners", we are trying to find ways of tuning into only what we need (tuning out what we don't need), and becoming less sensitive (damping ourselves) to the sheer volume of what's out there.

So, as the media delivers increasing amounts of  information about more and more topics like swine flu, we hunker down, put on our headphones, read editorials, become fundamentalists.

How do we maintain and increase our ability to resonately absorb the information that we need when the volume is so loud, and getting louder?