Information Overkill

Strange, that nobody has created this WikiPage yet.

I have read, that the amount of human knowledge doubles every some years.

This may be true if bits are counted, which are just data.

I fear, that most of these bits are redundant. And that we will quickly drown in these vast amounts of useless (?) data. It might just be an InformationOverkill.

I wonder if we need better tools to constrain these amounts or at least make the redundancy explicit.

And then I wonder if the amount of human knowledge really doubles (or increases at all) if this redundancy is discounted.

What are your thoughts?

-- GunnarZarncke

Methods against InformationOverkill:

Do not just digitalize everything, instead improve it on the way (see ImproveInsteadOfCopy).
Filter the apply the base in the sense of DontLoseGoodIdeas.
Forget unuseful data (e.g. as in OnePileFilingSystem)

I'm pretty sure that information has doubled every year, that it isn't just bits. The reasoning is simple. More and more people are becoming connected to the net every year. More and more people are pursuing such activities as writing every year. Better and better tools are being constructed to help people write, communicate, and generate information in general.

Isn't information that which has meaning for people? As opposed to redundant data/bits. It isn't that communication is anything new; people have communicated for thousands of years. And I don't think that all of a sudden people have a much higher need for meaning. Or are capable of handling arbitrary amounts of it. And just because different people write different bits on the net, that doesn't mean these have a different meaning (and hence information content).

But they do. The total amount of information consumed by any one person hasn't grown much but what has grown is people's ability to generate and distribute information. As a result, what people consume is vastly more diverse now than it was in the past. Just a few decades ago, there were only 3 television channels in North America and 100 million people all watched the same show. This is inconceivable nowadays. Today, the total information space has grown so much that the average cross-section of any two strangers' information consumption is much smaller. Eventually it will become insignificant and the whole concept of a culture will disappear.

Maybe. Maybe the total amount of information is catching up with the exponential population increase recently (recently=10^2 years). But that triggers an idea: If the amount of individual processing is more or less constant and information ioverall is increasing, then we are loosing coherence (for a lock of a better word). I cannot expect anybody specific to possess a certain information. Which actually means, that that information has less information (shannon). Sounds like a contradiction. Uhh, better stop thinking about it.

Is information the same thing for everyone? There are a lot of Japanese websites out there that don't mean a thing to me.

See also InfoGlut and InformationOverload (a book)