Haja informação

Em 1991, ao escrever a segunda edição do seu "Precision Journalism", mestre Philip Meyer lascou: "Num mundo onde a quantidade de informação dobra a cada cinco anos, precisa-se de especialistas para entender e comunicar boa parte dessa informação." Quando li isso, seis anos depois, pensei: "caraca! Cinco anos pra dobrar!"

Pois bem. O que demorava cinco anos em 1991 deve passar a demorar 11 horas em 2012, segundo um estudo da IBM sobre os problemas com o acúmulo da informação:

It is projected that just four years from now, the world’s information base will be doubling in size every 11 hours. So rapid is the growth in the global stock of digital data that the very vocabulary used to indicate quantities has had to expand to keep pace. A decade or two ago, professional computer users and managers worked in kilobytes and megabytes. Now schoolchildren have access to laptops with tens of gigabytes of storage, and network managers have to think in terms of the terabyte (1,000 gigabytes) and the petabyte (1,000 terabytes). Beyond those lie the exabyte, zettabyte and yottabyte, each a thousand times bigger than the last.

Some observers have likened what is happening to the Industrial Revolution, when economies made the first move away from individual craftsmanship and towards the production line, with its potential for quantum increases in output. Except now it is not pots and pans or cars that are being produced in their thousands, but data bits in their millions, billions and trillions.

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