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Tue 05 May 2009Information overload as total of world's digital content rockets
THE WORLD’S store of digital content is now the equivalent of one full top-of-the-range iPod for every two people on the planet, following the explosion of social networking sites, internet-enabled mobile phones and government surveillance.
At 487 billion gigabytes, if the world’s rapidly-expanding digital content were printed and bound into books it would form a stack that would stretch from Earth to Pluto 10 times. As more people join the digital tribe – increasingly through internet-enabled mobile phones – the world’s digital output is increasing at such a rate that those stacks of books are rising quicker than Nasa’s fastest rocket.
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