The ability to read and interpret alone will not be enough to survive as a professional, a scientist or a commercial organization. Pieter Adriaans and Dolf Zintinge
In one of his short stories, The Library of Babel, South-American writer Morge Louis Borges describes an infinite barbel library as an endless network of rooms with bookshelves, although most of the books have no meaning and have unintelligible titles like ‘Axaxaxaxs mlo’, people wander round this library until they die.
And, scholars develop wild hypotheses about it: ‘somewhere there must be a central catalog'; ‘all the books that one could possibly think of must be somewhere in the library'; 'the library has an endless structure that repeat itself indefinitely’. None of these hypotheses can be verified – the library contains and infinite amount of data but no information.
The library of Babel may be interpreted as an interesting but cruel metaphor for the situation in which modern humans find themselves: we live in an expanding universe of data in which there is too much data and too little information.
The development of new techniques to find the required information from huge amounts of data is one of the main challenges for software developers today. The quantity of data in the world roughly doubles every year, and as a somewhat surprising consequence, the amount of meaningful information decreases rapidly.
The very fact that the amount of information is growing is the reason it is increasingly difficult to find the meaningful facts we seek. We can't see the wood for the trees. For the most part, this growth of information is due to the mechanical production of texts.
Most international organizations produce more information in a week than many people could read in a lifetime. The situation is even more alarming in worldwide networks like the Internet.
Every day hundreds of megabytes of data are distributed around the world, but it is no longer possible to monitor this increasingly rapid development - the growth is exponential. We are confronted with the new paradox of the growth of data, that more data means less information.
The mechanical production and reproduction of data force us to adapt our strategies and develop mechanical methods for filtering, selecting, and interpreting data.
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