Information explosion

As an information explosion or explosion of knowledge is referred to the observation that the amount of information in the information society in the ratio increases disproportionately to other areas of social or economic system; this statement, however, refers primarily to the quantity, not necessarily on the quality of information newly created.

Subjectively, the individual information overload can see exposed, in which there is less of a problem in the availability of information or knowledge, but rather the application of appropriate information filtering or sorting options to get relevant materials. The information overload making it difficult to find correct and important information. Knowledge management is concerned with the solutions.

Quantification

The first attempts to quantify the growth of knowledge, date back to the 1950s. In the USSR, Gennady Mikhailovich Dobrov 1971 examined using statistical analyzes, the production of knowledge. In the U.S., was published in 1963 the work of Derek de Solla Price " Little Science - Big Science" ( Ger. 1974). The measured quantity used de Solla Price, the number of original publications in scientific journals; according to his calculations, the knowledge has been growing since the mid-17th century, with a doubling time of about 15 years exponentially. More recent estimates suggest that the world's knowledge even about every five up to twelve years doubled, with this rate accelerated. An important role is played by the diffusion speed of information via the Internet and the (electronic) media. Growth According to a study from 2003 rose annually to stored information between 1999 and 2002 by 30 percent. In 2002, 5 exabytes of new information were produced that were saved 92 percent on a magnetic medium. The World Wide Web at this point contained about 170 terabytes of information.

Recent estimates have shown the following results:

To receive the global technological capacity information by unidirectional broadcasting and broadcast channels is 1986-2007 average growth of 7%;
To save the global technological capacity information, has grown 1986-2007 with an average of 25%;
Replace the global effective capacitance of the information through two-way telecommunication networks grew during the same two decades, with an annual average of 30%;
The technological capacity of the world to calculate information using human -led multi-purpose computer, is annually grown in the same period by 61 %.

The science historian Franz Graf- Stuhlhofer doubts that the growth of scientific information with the counting of the number of publications can be measured; He therefore calls for a distinction between

Growth of scientific information and
Growth of knowledge.

For his own calculations of the growth of knowledge he evaluated the scope of textbooks, the number of famous naturalist and significant discoveries 1500-1900; based on this calculation, the scientific knowledge doubles just about every hundred years.

Veralterungszyklen

Information Lifecycle Management deals with the management and development of information taking into account the change in the value of information over time.

Measurement of qualitative growth

Taking the frequency with which a publication by other authors was quoted as a benchmark for assessing the importance and the value of a specialist publication, it should be noted that most of the publications are only a few times and only very cited a few frequently ( Pareto distribution ).

In the natural sciences the citation of publications with the Science Citation Index (SCI ) of the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI ) can be determined.

Growth in the number of scientists

Number of people with scientific and technical training ( according to Marx and gram 1994/2002 ):

Mid 17th century: < 1 million
1850-1950: increase of 1 to 10 million
1950-2000: increase of 10 to 100 million.

A critique of quantitative determinations of ' knowledge '

That 'knowledge' occurs in at least two fundamentally different categories, Nassim Nicholas Taleb has shown. Taleb believes that the knowledge of Medio Kristan and of Extremistan - two model countries that Taleb has created for purposes of illustration - differs in that there is a form of knowledge that is quantifiable grows ( Medio Kristan ) while the other knowledge may contain categorical outstanding and extreme in this sense, ' data ' ( Extremistan ). The establishment of a new form of data enabling theory would alleging a different kind of knowledge, as the knowledge about the data that are generated by the theory.