Jamie is a User Experience Designer and Content Strategist currently based in Dublin, Ireland. He is a member of Long Now Foundation, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. On occasion, he talks about himself in the third person.
Between the dawn of time and 2003, mankind generated about 5 exabytes of information. That's 5 billion gigabytes - or if you like your analogies old skool - a row of floppy disks ten times wider than the sun. Now this same amount of information is now being generated every two years, much of it crammed into the haphazard maelstrom we call the internet. And this is only the beginning.
Every day we fill servers full of news, books, photos and video. Tweets and blogs. Podcasts and publications. We have cameras on every corner and eyes in every pocket. Devices to determine our coordinates in space and time. The challenge now is not gathering information, but sorting into a comprehensible form and making it useful. Search engines are only part of the solution. Just as important are the new diciplines have evolved to cope with these challenges. Interface Designers, UX Specialists and Information Architects working together to light up the Deep Web - a realm of the internet thought to be orders of magnitude greater than the one we currently know.
Already suffering from acute information overload, we have barely dipped our toe in the Information Age, and the challenges before us are enormous. I hope to do my own, small part, in finding solutions.