There Is Too Much to Read
Yes, I actually read the entire Mueller Report, but I’m what many call “a reader.” I read two newspapers a day, but that is a far cry from the amount of copy that is being produced every day. We are blasted with the data equivalent of 174 newspapers per day, according to a USC School for Communications doctoral student study.
The study estimated a daily average of 174 newspapers worth of data, or “1.9 zettabytes of information,” during the yearlong study period. I’d never heard of a zettabyte, but it sounds enormous. (Wikipedia describes a zettabyte this way: “A zettabyte is one sextillion (one long scale trilliard) bytes. The unit symbol is ZB. 1 ZB = 10007bytes = 1021bytes = 1000000000000000000000bytes = 1000exabytes = 1millionpetabytes = 1billionterabytes = 1trilliongigabytes.”)
According to the study, “Looking at both digital memory and analog devices, humankind can store at least 295 exabytes of information. (That’s a number with 20 zeroes in it.) Put another way, if a single star is a bit of information, that’s a galaxy of information for every person in the world.”
With all this clutter, there is no reason to use jargon, long sentences, complicated language, complex concepts, over-sized words, no bullets, bad stories …
We must make it easier to consume our copy, infographics and video. And there needs to be a bigger reward for taking the time in this galaxy of data.