Information Overload（在线收听）

Information Overload

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Information everywhere!

The enormous volume of stored data is only a fraction of the information blizzard. Nearly three times more information flowed through telephones, radio, television or the Internet and vanished, unrecorded, into cyberspace in 2002.

The recent surge of spam on the Internet and unwanted calls from telemarketers has swollen the numbers since the year of the study, the authors believe.

The facts of the study

In their study, Lyman and Varian found that:

About 5.4 billion gigabytes of new information was stored on paper, film, magnetic disks (such as computer hard drives) or optical disks (such as DVDs) in 2002. That compared with 3.2 billion gigabytes in 1999.

If all that information were divided equally, each person in the world would need a 30-foot shelf of books to store the output of the year 2002 on paper.

The United States produced about 40 percent of the world’s new stored information. That includes 33 percent of all printed material, 30 percent of all new film and 50 percent of all the data recorded on computer disks.

Stored office documents accounted for 86 percent of new printed material in 2002. Newspapers and magazines took up 12 percent, leaving only fractions for books and scholarly journals. “Although printed material is small in quantity, it’s highly refined,” Lyman said. “The relative value of information in books or journals is high, compared to digital storage of raw data.”

People churned out 440 million gigabytes of e-mail in 2002. An estimated 40 percent of this was unsolicited bulk mail or spam. Almost none of it was saved.

“What I want to study next is how do people make sense of all this,” Lyman said.

“We need more research on how to manage information effectively,” Varian adds. “We should teach information management in schools.”

Vocabulary Focus

blizzard (n) [5blizEd] a large amount of something which arrives or is produced together in a confusing or badly organized way (informal)

swell (v) [swel] to cause to increase in size or amount

churn out (idiom) to produce large amounts of something quickly, usually something of low quality

Specialized Terms

telemarketer (n) 电话营销员 someone who advertises or sells goods or services by telephone

gigabyte (n) 千兆字节，计算资讯单位，相当于1024个兆字节 a unit of computer information, consisting of 1024 megabytes

optical disk (n phr) 光碟 a disk that information is written to by laser allowing for increased storage capacity, such as compact disks (CDs, CD-ROMs) and digital video disks (DVDs, DVD-ROMs)

资讯超载

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资讯无所不在

大量的储存资讯仅是资讯风爆的冰山一角。更有高达3倍之多的资讯，于2002年在电话、收音机、电视及互连网流通。这些资讯并未被储存，就此在虚拟世界消失无踪。

李曼与法瑞安更相信，最近互连网上垃圾邮件泛滥，以及电话行销员不请自来的推销电话，更令以上数据自他们研究过后遽增。

研究结果

李曼与法瑞安的研究显示：

2002年时，储存于纸张、影片、磁碟（如电脑硬盘）或光碟（如DVD）的新资讯约达54亿GByte（1个GBvte约相当于1024百万位字节），相较之下，1999年的资料储存量仅32亿GByte。

若将以上资讯均分，全球每人各需一高达30英尺的书柜，才能放置2002年列印出来的资料。

约40％的新产生的资讯来自美国，其中包含所有印刷品的33％、新影片的30％及所有储存于电脑磁盘中资料的50％。

2002年所存储的办公室文件，占新印刷资讯的86％。报章杂志占1 2％，其余少部分为书籍与学术刊物。李曼说：“印刷品虽然数量不多，却很精致。书籍与刊物相较于以数字格式储存的原始资料，拥有更高的资讯价值。”

2002年人们大量产出440万GByte的电子邮件，约40％为不请自来的大宗邮件或垃圾邮件，几乎全部未被储存。

李曼说：“我接着要研究人们如何在其中理出头绪。”

法瑞安说：“我们需要针对如何有效地管理资讯，进行更多研究。我们应该在学校教授资讯管理课程。”