Information obesity
Although this is not exactly new news, the sheer quantity of data that is produced and consumed in the world is truly staggering. Peter Lyman and Hal Varian have created a project that attempts to quantify the amount of information that is produced, stored and consumed on various media. A quote from that site:
[T]he world's total yearly production of print, film, optical, and magnetic content would require roughly 1.5 billion gigabytes of storage. This is the equivalent of 250 megabytes per person for each man, woman, and child on earth.
That is astounding and speaks about the amount of information overload we suffer. What makes it even more compelling is that the amount of digital magnetic storage shipped each year doubles and that the US accounts for an outsized proportion of the data created and consumed. And here I am contributing to the problem.