Description
There is an ancient Greek legend about the mystic creature Sphinx who plagued the city of Thebes. The Sphinx would routinely ask the passerby’s a riddle and whoever could not answer it would be snatched up and eaten by the beast. The hero Oedipus then went before the Sphinx and asked it to tell him the riddle, upon telling him Oedipus responded with the correct answer to the riddle. Hearing this, the Sphinx disappeared, bringing an end its threat to people.
Now people encounter a new mystic Sphinx that emerges from the technological development. This modern Sphinx asks the question what is information and how it functions. If people do not find a correct answer to this problem, technology threats to destroy humankind because people become more and more dependent on information technology. Really, the importance of information for society grows so fast that our time is called the “information age” (cf., for example, (Giuliano, 1983; Goguen, 1997; Mason, 1986; Crawford and Bray-Crawford, 1995; Stephanidis, 2000)). It is generally acknowledged that we have been living in the “information age”, at least, since the middle of the 20th century. Information not only constitutes the very foundation of most industrial sectors, but more significantly has been now transformed into a primary tradable resource or commodity (Macgregor, 2005). In fact, there is no aspect of human experience that lies outside information influence.
For instance, Martin (1995) acknowledges that information functions as the lifeblood of society, writing: Without an uninterrupted flow of the vital resource [information], society, as we know it, would quickly run into difficulties, with business and industry, education, leisure, travel, and communications, national and international affairs all vulnerable to disruption. In more advanced societies, this vulnerability is heightened by an increasing dependence on the enabling powers of information and communication technologies. Information is all around us, as well as in us. Our senses collect and our brains filter, organize and process information every second of the day. Information makes our lives possible.
Since creation of the Internet, the volume of information available to people has grown exponentially. The World Wide Web, despite only being generally available since 1995, has thoroughly trampled all existing information media in its path to become one of the primary information delivery mechanisms (Duff, 2003).
An estimated 1-2 exabytes (1 exabyte is equal to 1018 bites) of new information is produced (and stored) each year. This includes all media of information storage: books, magazines, documents, the Internet, PCs, photographs, x-rays, TV, radio, music, CDs, DVDs, etc. It makes roughly 250 megabytes for every person on the planet. However, most of information is digital (93%, to be precise).
Printed materials are estimated as 240 terabytes (1 terabyte is equal to 1015 bites). This makes up less than a fraction of 1% of the total new information storage. However, there are about 7.5 billion office documents printed each year, as well as almost one million books, 40,000 journals, and 80,000 magazines.
At the same time, deficiencies with information quality impose significant costs on individual companies, organizations, and the whole economy, resulting in the estimated costs only to the US economy at $600 billion per year (cf., (Hill, 2004)).