Among their jaw-dropping findings: the amount of new information stored on paper, film, magnetic and optical media has roughly doubled in the last three years. Five exabytes of new information — roughly five billion gigabytes — was created in 2002 alone. How big are five exabytes? Imagine half a million libraries as big as the Library of Congress print collections, and you’re on the right track. Each year almost 800 MB of recorded information is produced per person. If stored on paper, that would take about 30 feet of books. But 92% of all that new information is stored on magnetic media, mostly hard disks, rather than on paper, film or optical media.
The cited work is here.
I have a quibble with the use of “information” when I see claims like this. In an old analogy (circa 1996) that I still think holds up, I defined data as oil in the ground and information as gas at the pump. Information informs as a result of having been refined.
And of course the other issue I take with this is with the notion that any of this information is created: I suspect a lot of it is replicated. In the digital age, taking copies of stuff is easy, and I would wager than a lot of the bulging hard drives cited are littered with copies of material created and archived elsewhere.
Perhaps I am misreading this: I don’t know if the study is find that individuals are creating 800 Mb of stuff each year or if stuff is being created on their behalf, on the order of 800 Mb.
It strikes me, from personal experience, that much of the paper usage cited is not for original works but such embarrassments as printed email and copies of presentations that, while created for the screen, are printed in paper.