Information explosion

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An information explosion or knowledge explosion is the observation that the amount of information in the information society increases disproportionately in relation to other areas of the social or economic order; however, this statement primarily relates to the quantity , not necessarily the quality of the newly created information.

Subjectively, the individual can find himself exposed to a flood of information in which the problem is less the availability of information or knowledge than the use of appropriate information filters or sorting options to get to relevant materials. The information overload makes it difficult to find correct and important information. Knowledge management deals with the solutions.

quantification

The first attempts to quantify the growth of knowledge date back to the 1950s . In 1971, in the USSR , Gennadi Michailovic Dobrov examined the production of knowledge with the help of statistical analyzes. In 1963 a book by Derek de Solla Price "Little Science, Big Science" (German 1974 ) was published in the USA . De Solla Price used the number of original publications in specialist journals as a measure ; according to his calculations, knowledge has been growing exponentially since the middle of the 17th century, with a doubling time of around 15 years. The science historian Franz Graf-Stuhlhofer doubts that the growth of scientific information can be measured by counting the total number of publications ; he therefore demands a distinction between

  • Growth of scientific information and
  • Knowledge growth.

For his own calculations of the growth of knowledge, he examined the increase in the number of important naturalists and important discoveries between 1500 and 1900 ; based on such calculations, scientific knowledge only doubles roughly every hundred years.

More recent estimates assume that the world's knowledge doubles every five to twelve years, and this rate is accelerating. The technical capacities for storage, processing and transmission are increasing even faster. According to a study from 2003, the amount of data stored increased annually between 1999 and 2002 by 30 percent, to 5 exabytes , to 92 percent on magnetic data carriers . Most of them were copies. The World Wide Web at that time contained about 170 terabytes of information. Estimates for the larger period from 1986 to 2007 found similar average annual increases in global capacities:

  • 6% for the bandwidth of the mass media ,
  • 23% for the storage capacity,
  • 28% for the bandwidth of bidirectional telecommunications ,
  • 58% for information processing capacity using general purpose human operated computers.

These increasing capacities are used in the area of ​​personal data in three ways:

  1. increasing level of detail, measured according to the number of data fields collected ,
  2. increasing individualization by replacing aggregated statistical data with person-specific data,
  3. more actors create a new data record for each person.

Growth in the number of scientists

Number of people with scientific and technical training (according to Marx and Gramm 1994/2002):

  • Mid 17th century: <1 million
  • 1850 to 1950: increase from 1 to 10 million (this corresponds to a doubling time of about 30 years)
  • 1950 to 2000: increase from 10 to 100 million.
Distribution of the 298 dates of death in a biographical lexicon 'Großer Naturforscher' from 1970.

However, posterity assesses an ever smaller proportion of these people as very significant, because their number only roughly doubles per century (according to Stuhlhofer 1983).

Machine-collected data

More and more data records are created without human intervention. This includes not only marginal data (when using electronic infrastructure) , but also scientific content such as gene sequences or astronomical surveys .

Obsolescence cycles

Information lifecycle management deals with the administration and development of information, taking into account the change in the value of information over time.

Related topics

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Roland Wagner-Döbler: Growth cycles of technical-scientific creativity. A quantitative study with special attention to mathematics. Frankfurt / Main 1997 (revised habilitation thesis of the University of Augsburg), p. 121: "... comes F. Stuhlhofer (1983) ... to much longer 'knowledge doubling times' than D. Price."
  2. ↑ P. Lyman et al .: How much information 2003? (accessed June 30, 2008)
  3. ^ "The World's Technological Capacity to Store, Communicate, and Compute Information" , Martin Hilbert and Priscila López (2011), Science , 332 (6025), 60-65; Free access to the article is available here: martinhilbert.net/WorldInfoCapacity.html
  4. ↑ "Video animation about The World's Technological Capacity to Store, Communicate, and Compute Information from 1986 to 2010 ( Memento of the original from January 18, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / ideas.economist.com
  5. ↑ Latanya Sweeney: explosion of information. In: L. Zayatz, P. Doyle, J. Theeuwes and J. Lane (eds): Confidentiality, disclosure, and data access: Theory and practical applications for statistical agencies. Urban Institute, Washington DC, 2001 ( PDF ).
  6. ↑ Franz Stuhlhofer: Our knowledge doubles every 100 years. Foundation of a "knowledge measurement". In: Reports on the history of science . 6, 1983, pp. 169–193, there 180: an evaluation of the lifetimes of Fritz Krafft, Adolf Meyer-Abich (ed.): Große Naturwissenschaftler. Biographical Lexicon. Frankfurt / Main 1970, selected 298 researchers.

literature

  • Dieter E. Zimmer : "The world is a disc" , in: Die Zeit from February 10, 2000
  • GM Dobrov: The Potential of Science . Berlin: Akademie-Verlag 1971
  • Derek J. De Solla Price : Little Science, Big Science (Suhrkamp-Taschenbuch - Wissenschaft 48). Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag 1974. Excerpts from hu-berlin.de
  • Franz Stuhlhofer: Structures of scientific activity and the exponential growth of modern science. In: Reports on the history of science . 3, 1980, pp. 115-126.
  • Franz Stuhlhofer: Our knowledge doubles every 100 years. In: Reports on the history of science. 6, 1983, pp. 169-193.

Web links