Zettabyte Problem -- So Much Is Published

[Extollager]

http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Zettabyte-Problem.php

 

[MWagner]

Fascinating article. Lost of great stuff about knowledge, publishing, and genre.

Put differently, half of all the writers who have ever lived are living still. Given the unstoppable population growth and the lengthening of the average lifespan, this fraction seems again destined to increase asymptotically until the day when nearly all writers in history will be creating in the eternal present...

...It may take a long time, but you can be sure to find a proverbial good book in a thousand. But you will never find a million good books in a billion. So much for the bromides of serving the public by putting more and more art in people’s hands, or at their fingertips.

The spectre of unknown numbers of contemporary Shakespeares lying buried under pyramids of paper that no one could hope to burrow through should be enough to look for some kind of capping mechanism to the inflationary trends exhibited by our culture...

One thing, however, is certain: with ever more books around and buyers spoiled for choice, these days it takes a lot more than a knack for telling a good story to stand out as a writer. Hemmed in by millions of competitors for the readers’ and reviewers’ time, to break out from the shadows of zettabyte anonymity more than ever before authors need to think strategically to differentiate themselves and their brand from the countless millions of others on tap. Welcome to the culture of celebrity gushing and bashing, in which creators compete less with history than with the zettabyte present...

This is the essential problem of limitless creation and sharing. How to find an audience in a biblical flood of new content? We're experiencing the dawn of a new model of creation, and I fear it may be looked back on as a time of simple innocence compared to what comes after. Bots, algorithms, contracted bloggers under false identities, cliques as self-serving as medieval guilds, deeply compromised curators, contrived scandals, all cruising relentlessly in a fathomless sea of online data.

 

[Stephen Palmer]

It is a huge problem. The only solution I've come up with so far is (i) make real friends on forums, FB etc, (ii) be yourself and nobody else, at all costs - then you can be your own brand, rather than somebody else's, and that in the long run will help. But, as ever, there is lots of luck involved.

 

[Vertigo]

There is some extraordinarily bad science in that article and it is grossly misleading in that it blatantly ignores the fact that a very large proportion of all that data is scientific rather than cultural. I don't have any evidence but I would guess that it's actually not just a large proportion but the vast majority by far of the data is not cultural.

I agree it is getting harder to find quality amongst the dross but I disagree that it is as end-of-the-world making as the article is attempting, sensationally, to suggest.

 

[Ursa major]

Sticking with the mistaken use of the zettabyte here, rather than the rest of the article....

a very large proportion of all that data is scientific rather than cultural

The LHC is said to produce 15 petabytes of information a year, information that is, by definition, unique.

But there's a bigger issue: the article seems to concentrate on books, which must be a tiny fraction of the information included in that zettabyte. If one were to be assigned a task to create the most information, would one start writing or start taking images? Anyone with any sense (and a means of taking images) would do the latter. (And producing videos would generate a lot more bytes for the same effort, using a digital camera or device containing similar functionality.) And that's only for the originals. Who knows what the ratio between the rate of copying of books, of images and of videos? I would have thought there was a reasonable chance that the average image and the average video were both copied more frequently than the average book.