Keep in mind that:

1 Terabyte equals one thousand gigabytes or one million megabytes or one trillion bytes or...

• An automated tape robot
• All the X-ray films in a large technological hospital

2 Terabytes equals all the information in an academic research library   

How about Exabytes? One exabyte equals one billion gigabytes or...

• 2 Exabytes equal the total volume of information generated worldwide annually
• 5 Exabytes equal all the words ever spoken by human beings

With the advent of the Information age it seems that there is way too much information for us to absorb. The increase in publishing, the growth of news and other media, the advances in worldwide communications and now the explosion of information on the Internet all contribute to the sense that finding the information we need is just about impossible.

Information Explosion
Information overload is not a new concept. In fact, it's been around for quite a while, beginning long before the Information Age.

A few quotes regarding information.

• "Of making many books, there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh."-Ecclesiastes 12:12

• "The multitude of books is a great evil. There is no measure of limit to this fever for writing; every one must be an author; some out of vanity, to acquire celebrity and raise up a name; others for the sake of mere gain." -Martin Luther, 1569 (Leader of the Protestant Reformation a little more than a hundred years following the invention of movable type by Johannes Gutenberg.)

• "The enormous multiplication of books in every branch of knowledge is one of the greatest evils of this age; since it presents one of the most serious obstacles to the acquisition of correct information by throwing in the reader's way piles of lumber in which he must painfully grope for the scraps of useful lumber." -Edgar Allan Poe, 1845

Of course, in the information age information overload is easily recognized:

• "In expanding the field of knowledge we but increase the horizon of ignorance." -Henry Miller, 1941

• "Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense." -Gertrude Stein, 1959

• "We're drowning in information and starving for knowledge." -Rutherford D Rogers, 1985

Obviously, we're dealing with far more information than Martin Luther or Edgar Allan Poe, but our brains really aren't working any faster than in times past. That's the challenge of information.