Information Futures

Video of last month’s Information Futures Forum is now available online — well worth a look!

The feedback from those who attended this event was overwhelmingly good — guest speaker Rhys Francis was rated as “excellent” for his knowledge of the subject, his presentation style, the content of the presentation and the relevance of the topic to the University.

Rhys provided an entertaining and provocative insight into the changing nature of knowledge and its implications for the IT infrastructure we will need for doing research in the next 10 years.

This is what we broadly call “e-research” — the use of information technology to create, analyse, manipulate, store, distribute and preserve data that is created in the course of doing research.

This is my favorite slide from Rhys’s presentation — click the thumbnail image to see a bigger version.

The Y axis is global population — 2000 is 2 billion people, 4000 is 4 billion, and so on.

The X axis is a timeline starting at the year 1000 and going to 2400 and beyond.

The graph shows that the growth in global population was relatively flat until the 19th century. It then started increasing rapidly. Predictions are that the world’s population growth will flatten again at around 10 billion, some time in the next 100-200 years.

Rhys suggested that today we are in the midst of both a population explosion and an information explosion. Western cultural heritage, as captured in recorded information, has developed slowly in the last 400 years.

With the advent of mass communication, and in particular ubiquitous digital and mobile technology, the amount of recorded information is growing rapidly. A study published by UC Berkeley estimated that print, film, magnetic and optical storage media produced about 5 exabytes of new information in 2002.

Five exabytes is enough to:

• digitise the contents of the US Library of Congress 37,000 times
• store (as text) all sentences ever spoken in human history

(Telephone calls would have added 17.3 exabytes of new information, if stored in digital form.)

In 2002, new information was growing at a rate of about 30 per cent each year. Today, it is even faster. The recently-released EMC2-sponsored study by International Data Corporation (IDC) starts its executive summary with some gobsmacking statistics:

• The digital universe in 2007 — at 2.25 x 1021 bits (281 exabytes or 281 billion gigabytes) — was 10 per cent bigger than predicted in 2002.
• The resizing comes as a result of faster growth in cameras, digital TV shipments, and better understanding of information replication.
• By 2011, the digital universe will be 10 times the size it was in 2006.
• As forecast in 2002, the amount of information created, captured, or replicated exceeded available storage for the first time in 2007. Not all information created and transmitted gets stored, but by 2011, almost half of the digital universe will not have a permanent home.

Rhys Francis suggested that physical limitations on digital storage and transmission will slow the growth of recorded information, at about the same time as global population growth slows.

In summary, our scholarly environment cannot be used as a predictor of the scholarly environment 50 or 100 years hence. In Rhys’s words:

We just happen to be living at the most exciting time for any researcher. There’s more researchers than there ever has been before, and it’s growing. There’s more capability in IT and computing and data than there ever has been before. We’re better connected than we ever have been before.

But all these things are going to flatten out and the future researcher is actually going to be working in a continuous model of the world rather than an exploding model of the world. Our thoughts are not going to drive what they need, and we need to be aware of that. So aren’t we glad we’re alive?

If we’re alive now, in our lifetime we’re going to see an increment to knowledge that’s incredibly large compared to the total knowledge. In the future, the researcher is going to see in their lifetime an increment to knowledge that’s a small increment compared to the total knowledge, and that increment could go down. The problem the researchers have got is “How much of this [knowledge] can you actually know? How effective can we be when we are swamped by knowledge and information?”

Well, I’m excited :-)