Information overload

Amount of data

It seems that data grow follows Moore's law; the world wide data amount doubles every 18 month.

Number of people

That's frightening enough but what makes me really wonder that the  number of people ever lived increases at a much smaller rate. The number of people ever lived is 108 Billion. Approximately 270 million babies are born ever 18 month which is an increase of 0,2% percent. 

Even if people  publish much more than they ever did, and the content needs an increasingly larger space (e.g. videos) the global knowledge of humanity can't grow at such a pace (I assume that computers doesn't create knowledge yet). So we must have an increasing entropy of information.

The consequences

On the other hand the capacity of our brain is limited and it doesn't grow very fast either. So we have an increasing difficulty finding the relevant information among the vast amount of data we can access.

Manage information overload

We have the following opportunities to tackle with this problem:

• Isolation

We can "close the doors" of our digital world and use e.g. Facebook only for all kind of digital presence, or set of iPad applications. That - very logical - move may lead to the fragmentation of the Web. That is not desirable and doesn't solve the problem either (because the big portal and social network vendor will rebuild the whole information universe within their realm).

• Improve tools

Vendors may go on improving the current tools (search, navigation, links) to provide better results. These tolls must be increasingly personalized to much style, interest, knowledge level... etc.

• Artificial intelligence

Clever programs may structure and tag information to extract as much value as possible from it.  They also could engage in conversation with people to answer questions.

• Collaboration

We all work with information, maybe there will be professional information workers (there already are e.g. journalists) who provide personalized information services, naturally with the help of the most sophisticated tools and their social network. 

• Problem solving

Maybe our information retrieval scope is limited.  Very often I you look for information actively because you want to find a solution for a problem (even if it doesn't feel like that). What if we had a clear easy to use problem solving tool, which integrates several tools to help the solution process? E.g. it could help to define the problem/issue, define the problem domain, find the people in our network (or outside) who can help us, provide various problem solving tools (e.g. mind map, cause and effect diagram, CTQ flow down, genetic algorithms... ) most suitable for the problem at hand, present the problem...). There are several problem solving methods, the trick would be to integrate them into a good toolbox which is as easy to use as search is today.

Links:

Oracle Storage Guy blog
Wikipedia: Moore's law
Wikipedia: Population growth
Population Reference Bureau: How Many People Have Ever Lived on Earth