Page 12 - Virtual Research Lab flip book

rates, and usually too much evidence: hundreds of millions or billions of people, millions of books, a few of which are printed in millions of copies, trillions of URLs, as of January 2011 over 10 billion apps downloaded from Apple’s app store, which opened only 2.5 years prior, on July 10, 2008.
As large as these numbers are, they have precedents: the development of electric and electronic media, beginning in the 1830s with the development of the electric telegraph, which stimulated more and more communication. If we go back to the end of World War II in 1945, the year in which telegraphic use peaked in the United States, Americans sent 236 billion telegraph mes- sages that year, a huge number relative to the U. S. population at the time. With respect to the amount of information transferred, numbers may be deceptive since telegraph messages were charged for by the word and tended to be exceptionally brief, while the amount of text, audio and video infor- mation that can be transferred or exchanged in one minute either through analog channels or digitally on the Internet is incomparably greater than the amount of text that could be exchanged in the same time by telegraph. Because of the availability of increasingly rich and diverse information over wireless networks, the nature of telecommunication has changed. As of May 2010, cell phones, used by about 90% of American households, were used more for data, such as text messages, streaming video and music, than speech, and during 2008 to 2010 the average number of voice minutes per user in the United States fell. In his book, The Information: A Theory, a History, a Flood (2011), James Gleick quoted Jaron Lanier dramatically describing the scale of the ever-accelerating flood of electronic information we are experiencing: “It’s as if you kneel to plant the seed of a tree and it grows so fast that it swallows your whole town before you can even rise to your feet” (p. 395).
To attempt to compare the rapidly changing present with the late Mid- dle Ages or the more recent or more distant past, we often have to move back and forth from limited evidence viewed through history’s microscope, more accessible to individual interpretation, to quantities of information that may be most efficiently viewed through the telescope of the algorithm and the search engine. This exponential increase in quantity of available
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